Subalpine Aster Eurybia merita
Subalpine Aster is a perennial wildflower native to Canada and the lower 48 states. It blooms Jul – Aug. A host for pollen-specialist native bees.
More about this plant
Eurybia merita, commonly known as the subalpine aster or arctic aster, is an herbaceous perennial native to northwestern North America, primarily from the Interior Mountains and Plateau system and Rocky Mountains in Canada, stretching south to Utah and extreme northern California. It is found largely in drier, open areas, generally at subalpine levels in mountains, though in more northern areas it is more common at lower elevations. It is similar in appearance to Eurybia sibirica, but their ranges only overlap near the border between the US and Canada, where E. sibirica is generally found at higher elevations than its relative. The flowers emerge in the late summer and display purple to violet ray florets and pale or creamy yellow disc florets. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 5 derived from its U.S. range
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Flower colour
- Purple AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →✦ Bees specialist-bee host
Specialist native bees depend on it.
Some native bees are pollen specialists (oligolectic) — they raise young only on pollen from particular plant genera. Eurybia is a recorded specialist-bee host, so losing it can mean losing the bee that relies on it.
Related plants
More Eurybia →
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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