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iNaturalist — CC, credited & licensed per image
Bixaceae family

Silk Cottontree Cochlospermum vitifolium

Silk Cottontree is an introduced perennial tree, found in Puerto Rico.

More about this plant

Cochlospermum vitifolium or rosa amarilla is a tree belonging to the family Bixaceae. It reaches up to 12 metres (40 ft) in height and its leaves are deciduous. Its flowers are showy, yellow, solitary, and large, up to 10 centimetres (4 in) across. They resemble roses but do not belong to the same family. It inhabits the dry jungles of southern Mexico to Central America from sea level to 1,200 metres (3,900 ft) elevation. Its wood produces a yellow-orange dye used for dyeing cotton clothes. Wikipedia →

Growing & care

USDA PLANTS · TRY
Size & form
Sources · Size & form
Tallo — Jucker et al. 2025 (CC BY 4.0) — wild crown width — Mature width
USDA PLANTS — Lifespan
TRY Plant Trait Database (CC BY 4.0) — Foliage
McKenzie et al. 2025 — community-science image analysis (MIT) — Flower colour
Mature width
≈ 18 ft wide wild/forest-grown — open-grown specimens spread wider
Lifespan
Perennial
Foliage
Deciduous broadleaf
Flower colour
Yellow AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
In the garden
Tree layer (canopy / understory) — Sits in the tree of a layered food forest or polyculture.Open guide →
Chop-and-drop biomass — Soft, low-density wood is quick-growing and easy to cut back — coppice it and drop the trimmings in place as mulch.Open guide →
derived roles
AI = read by an AI vision model · DERIVED = a computed estimate, not a direct measurement. The “How we know this” section below details each.
Species characteristics from USDA PLANTS (public domain) + TRY (CC BY) — general guidance, not a guarantee for your exact site. Deer "browsing" is documented palatability, not a deer-proof claim.

Wildlife & pollinators

How pollinator value is scored →
✦ Bees 4 bee visitors

4 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Silk Cottontree :

Centris varia Melipona beecheii Trigona fulviventris Xylocopa cearensis · carpenter bee
Visitor records (observations, not exhaustive) from Noori et al. 2026 (CC BY 4.0) · GloBI →
Wildlife & visitors 2 birds

Open records of who else uses Silk Cottontree — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.

Interaction records (observations, not exhaustive) from GloBI → (CC0). Counts are distinct species; names are the most-recorded. Common names from Wikidata (CC0).
Species thumbnails re-hosted from iNaturalist — Creative Commons, credited per image (hover for credit). Click any species to see it on iNaturalist. Not exhaustive; many taxa have no openly-licensed photo yet.
How we know this (3) Methods & honest limits
Leaf build Direct fact

We read each species’ measured specific leaf area (leaf area per unit dry weight) from the Global Spectrum dataset and band it: thin & fast (high SLA), medium, or thick & tough (low SLA). The global median is about 10 mm²/mg.

Honest limits: A species-mean from pooled measurements — individual plants vary with light and site. A broad strategy signal, not a precise per-plant figure.

Díaz, S. et al. (2022) The global spectrum of plant form and function: enhanced species-level trait dataset. Scientific Data 9:755.
Photosynthesis Direct fact

A recorded categorical fact: each species is tagged C3 (standard), C4 (heat/water-efficient) or CAM (succulent, night-time CO₂ uptake) — or a facultative combination. We only show a trait card for the noteworthy C4/CAM cases; C3 is the unremarkable majority, kept in the data but not surfaced as a card.

Kattge, J. et al. TRY plant trait database — Categorical Traits Dataset (2012).
Flower colour Derived

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.

McKenzie, P., Berardi, A.E., Hopkins, R. (2025). flower_color_phenology (MIT).
Derived values are computed from open data by a published method — labelled, cited, and never shown as a direct observation. Full methodology →
Sources for this entry (19) Open & cited
[01] Scientific name & family — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[02] Growth habit & duration — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[03] Native status & distribution — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[04] Common name — USDA PLANTS (via GBIF)
[05] Invasive / introduced status — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — native status
[07] Description — Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)
[08] Ecological value — GloBI
[10] Functional traits — TRY Plant Trait Database (CC BY 4.0)
[11] Photosynthetic pathway — TRY Plant Trait Database (CC BY 4.0)
[12] Wildlife & visitors — GloBI — Global Biotic Interactions (CC0)
[18] Flower-visitor value (derived) — Noori et al. 2026 (CC BY 4.0) · GloBI
[19] County range — GBIF Open Data — open-licensed occurrences (CC0/CC-BY) → county
Spot an error or have a better photo? Every field links to its source, and the whole dataset is open.
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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