Inland Serviceberry Amelanchier interior
Inland Serviceberry is a perennial tree native to Canada and the lower 48 states. It grows to 26 ft and blooms May – Jun. A keystone plant for native insects and the food web.
More about this plant
Amelanchier interior or Wiegand's shadbush is type of serviceberry shrub. It produces a sweet tasting edible fruit called a pome, which can be eaten raw or cooked. The fruit has a sweet flavor. This species is a deciduous tree. It grows on hillsides and banks of streams and reaches up to nine meters. The plant prefers light (sandy), medium (loamy) and heavy (clay) soils and can grow in heavy clay soil. It can grow in acid, neutral and alkaline soils, as well as shade or semi-shade. It requires moist soil. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 5 derived from its U.S. range
- Height
- 26 ft
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Flower colour
- White AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~124 caterpillar species
Amelanchier supports ~124 caterpillar species.
Native butterfly & moth caterpillars are the base of the terrestrial food web — most songbirds rear their young almost entirely on them. As a host for native Lepidoptera this is an exceptional genus.
Recorded feeding on Amelanchier in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
Related plants
More Amelanchier →
How we know this (2) Methods & honest limits
We take the plant’s U.S. county range and look up each county’s long-term climate, then summarise: native rainfall = the median annual rainfall across its counties; heat tolerance = the warm end (90th percentile) of average temperature across its range (mirroring how our cold-hardiness floor uses an extreme). Counties + medians blunt the roadside/observer bias that makes point-level climate unreliable. Needs at least five placeable counties.
Honest limits: A realized, sampling-biased niche (where it has been recorded, not its physiological optimum), and county climate is coarse — large Western counties span deserts and mountains. Derived guide, never a measured fact.
McKenzie et al. assigned each species a flower colour with a GPT-4V vision model over iNaturalist photos. We use the confident tier plus a separately-labelled lower-confidence top-up (mostly inconspicuous green/brown flowers), and render it as a small tint — never as an asserted fact, and kept out of the written synopsis.
Honest limits: AI image inference (~87% expert agreement on the confident tier); a decorative, confidence-tiered indicator, not a measured trait.
Sources for this entry (18) Open & cited
Cite this page Open data, please attribute
PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).
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