Lemonyellow False Goldenaster Heterotheca camporum
Lemonyellow False Goldenaster is a perennial wildflower native to the lower 48 states. It grows to 1.9 ft and blooms Jul – Oct. A host for pollen-specialist native bees.
More about this plant
Heterotheca camporum, known by the common name lemonyellow false goldenaster, is a North American species of flowering plant in the family Asteraceae. It is found only in the central United States, primarily the Ozarks, the Cumberland Plateau, and the middle Mississippi Valley. There are reports of additional populations in the Northeast, the Southeast, and in the Great Lakes region, but these appear to be waifs or naturalizations. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 6 derived from its U.S. range
- Height
- 1.9 ft
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Foliage
- Broadleaf
- Flower colour
- Yellow AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~7 caterpillar species
Heterotheca supports ~7 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 a modest genus.
Recorded feeding on Heterotheca in North America, including:
✦ Bees specialist-bee host · 5 bee visitors
Specialist native bees depend on it.
Some native bees are pollen specialists (oligolectic) — they raise young only on pollen from particular plant genera. Heterotheca is a recorded specialist-bee host, so losing it can mean losing the bee that relies on it.
5 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Lemonyellow False Goldenaster :
Wildlife & visitors 6 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Lemonyellow False Goldenaster — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
6 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Heterotheca →
How we know this (3) Methods & honest limits
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.
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 (23) 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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