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Fabaceae family

Mesquite Prosopis juliflora

Drought-tough — Rated High for drought tolerance, corroborated by deep roots — a water-wise pick once it's established.

Mesquite is an introduced perennial tree, found in Hawaii. It grows to 33 ft and blooms Apr – Oct.

⚠ Invasive here — plant a native instead USDA + GBIF

Mesquite is flagged invasive in the U.S. These natives fill a similar niche — same growth habit, bloom season, height, and region — so you keep the look and feed local wildlife instead of spreading a problem.

Hawai'i Holly
Native
Hawai'i Holly
Ilex anomala
●●●○○
Sweet Acacia
Native
Sweet Acacia
Vachellia farnesiana
●●●●○
Kokea Lau Li'i
Native
Kokea Lau Li'i
Myrsine sandwicensis
●●●○○
Red Mangrove
Native
Red Mangrove
Rhizophora mangle
●●●○○
Matched on growth habit · bloom months · mature height · shared U.S. range (USDA + GBIF) — a starting point, not a prescription.

Growing & care

USDA PLANTS · TRY
Conditions
Sources · Conditions
Niinemets & Valladares 2006 (CC0) — Drought tolerance · Shade tolerance · Wet-soil tolerance
Drought tolerance
High
Shade tolerance
Low
Wet-soil tolerance
Low waterlogging
Size & form
Sources · Size & form
TRY Plant Trait Database (CC BY 4.0) — Height · Foliage
USDA PLANTS — Lifespan
Height
33 ft
Lifespan
Perennial
Foliage
Evergreen broadleaf
In the garden
Sub-canopy / understory layer — Sits in the understory of a layered food forest or polyculture. Its deep roots also work the lower soil profile.Open guide →
Nitrogen fixer — Fixes atmospheric nitrogen through root-nodule bacteria — builds soil fertility for itself and its neighbours, cutting fertiliser need.Open guide →
derived roles
The garden year bloom → fruit → fall colour
J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D
Bloom
Fall colour
Bloom (the flower's colour) Fall colour
Bloom · Apr – Oct — 48 obs · USA-NPN — Nature's Notebook (CC BY 4.0)
Fall colour · 39 obs · USA-NPN observed “coloured leaves” — timing varies by site & year
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
Named species (a documented Nearctic sample, not exhaustive) from NHM HOSTS (CC0). ✦ = recorded on this exact species.
✦ 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. Prosopis is a recorded specialist-bee host, so losing it can mean losing the bee that relies on it.

Xerces pollinator conservation →
Specialist hosts from Smith et al. 2024.
Wildlife & visitors 1 bird · 2 mammals

Open records of who else uses Mesquite — 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 (2) Methods & honest limits
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).
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 (23) 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 — US-RIIS v2.0 (USGS)
[06] Wetland indicator — USACE National Wetland Plant List (2022)
[08] Ecological value — GloBI · Smith et al. 2024 (CC BY)
[13] Functional traits — TRY Plant Trait Database (CC BY 4.0)
[14] Photosynthetic pathway — TRY Plant Trait Database (CC BY 4.0)
[15] Climate niche — Derived — realized climate niche from U.S. county occurrences (GBIF) × NOAA NCEI county climate normals 1991–2020 (public domain)
[16] Wildlife & visitors — GloBI — Global Biotic Interactions (CC0)
[17] Nitrogen fixation — Werner et al. 2014 (Dryad, CC0)
[18] Rooting depth — Fan et al. 2017 (Dryad, CC0)
[21] Stress tolerance — Niinemets & Valladares 2006 (CC0)
[22] Caterpillar species — NHM HOSTS (CC0)
[23] 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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