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Elatinaceae family

Small Waterwort Elatine minima

Native

Small Waterwort is an annual wildflower native to Canada, the lower 48 states, and Saint-Pierre & Miquelon.

More about this plant

Elatine minima is a species of flowering plant in the family Elatinaceae, native to eastern Canada, the north-central United States, the northeastern United States, and the southeastern United States. It was first described by Thomas Nuttall in 1817 as Crypta minima and transferred to Elatine in 1836. Wikipedia →

Growing & care

USDA PLANTS · TRY
Conditions
Sources · Conditions
Cold hardiness (derived) — Hardiness
Hardiness
≥ zone 5 derived from its U.S. range
Size & form
Sources · Size & form
USDA PLANTS — Lifespan
Lifespan
Annual
In the garden
Herb layer — Sits in the herb of a layered food forest or polyculture.Open guide →
Rain garden / bioswale — Rated OBL on the wetland list — tolerates wet feet, so it suits the soggy zone of a rain garden or bioswale that catches and filters runoff.Open guide →
derived roles
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 →
❧ Caterpillar hosts Documented caterpillar host

Recorded feeding on Elatine in North America, including:

Acentria nivea · snout moth
Named species (a documented Nearctic sample, not exhaustive) from NHM HOSTS (CC0).
How we know this (1) Methods & honest limits
Climate niche (heat tolerance & native rainfall) Derived

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.

Realized-niche / climate-envelope approach (Pearson & Dawson 2003; Soberón 2007). Climate: NOAA NCEI nClimDiv county normals (1991–2020).
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 (14) 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
[06] Wetland indicator — USACE National Wetland Plant List (2022)
[08] Description — Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)
[09] Ecological value — GloBI
[10] Conservation rank — NatureServe Explorer (CC BY)
[11] Climate niche — Derived — realized climate niche from U.S. county occurrences (GBIF) × NOAA NCEI county climate normals 1991–2020 (public domain)
[12] Cold hardiness (derived) — Derived from U.S. range × USDA PHZM zones
[13] Caterpillar species — NHM HOSTS (CC0)
[14] County range — GBIF Open Data — open-licensed occurrences (CC0/CC-BY) → county
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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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