Fernleaf Goldthread Coptis aspleniifolia
Fernleaf Goldthread is a perennial wildflower native to Alaska, Canada, and the lower 48 states.
More about this plant
Coptis aspleniifolia, commonly known as fernleaf goldthread or spleenwort-leaf goldthread, is found in the northern two-thirds of British Columbia, in Alaska, and along the Cascades into Washington and is a native plant of the temperate rain forests of the region. It is often found in the understory of the herb layer of coniferous forests as part of a multilayered canopy system on gleysolic or organic soils. Also found in wet woods and bogs, the fernleaf goldthread is not invasive or poisonous. The plant is considered common and widespread in its native range. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 9 derived from its U.S. range
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Flower colour
- White AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
Related plants
More Coptis →
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 (15) 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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