Mythbusters: Unravelling the pollutant uptake processes in mosses for air quality biomonitoring

•The potential of moss morphology to impact pollutant uptake has been neglected so far.•The cation exchange capacity of mosses cannot fully explain tissue pollutant loads.•We argue that the quality of mosses as biomonitors is based on misleading assumptions.•We propose how to boost the scientific quality of the biomonitoring studies' results.