Hammock Shrub-verbena (Lantana canescens)

Lantana canescens flowering in a home garden, Miami. Photo Credit: J. Possley

Global Rank: G4 - Apparently Secure
Legal Status: N/A
Family: Verbenaceae
State: FL, TX
Nature Serve ID: 161141
Lifeform: Shrub
Date Inducted in National Collection:

Description:

Lantana canescens is short-lived perrenial shrub that can grow up to 2 meters tall. Leaves are up to 6.5 cm long, opposite, simple, lanceolate to elliptic-lanceolate, densely hairy on both surfaces. Flowers are white and tubular. They grow in flattened clusters at the ends of long stalks arising from the stem. Fruit are tiny and seeds even smaller. The fruit contain 1-2 hard, dry seeds.

Where is Hammock Shrub-verbena (Lantana canescens) located in the wild?

Habitat:

Rockland hammock Rockland hammock/Pine rockland ecotone

Distribution:

in Florida: southern Miami-Dade rock ridge.in world: Florida, southern Texas, Cuba, West Indies, Mexico, Central America, South America (including Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Ecuador).

States & Provinces:

Hammock Shrub-verbena can be found in Florida, Texas

Which CPC Partners conserve Hammock Shrub-verbena (Lantana canescens)?

Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden

Not Sponsored

Conservation Actions

Assigned 06/09/17

CPC's Plant Sponsorship Program provides long term stewardship of rare plants in our National Collection. We are so grateful for all our donors who have made the Plant Sponsorship Program so successful. We are in the process of acknowledging all our wonderful plant sponsorship donors on our website. This is a work in progress and will be updated regularly.

Conservation Actions

Tina Stanley

05/11/2023

According to a March 2023 extract of the Florida Plant Rescue Database, Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden holds 2 accessions of Lantana canescens totalling approximately 3515 seeds representing 20 maternal lines.

Center for Plant Conservation

10/27/2021

As part of a larger study, Fairchild Tropical Botanical Garden investigated the dilemma of reintroducing a rare species into historic ecotones vs. novel restored sites. Species native to ecotones are often overlooked in restoration efforts despite the increasing rarity of ecotone habitat. In fragmented, fire-suppressed landscapes, true ecotone may no longer exist. Restoration biologists interested in reintroducing ecotone species must decide whether to plant them in historic ecotones maintained by mechanical thinning, or whether to opt for discrete restoration areas that are easier to maintain. We investigated these two alternatives with Lantana canescens, a rare tropical shrub native to the ecotone between pine and hardwood forests of Miami-Dade County, Florida, USA. Our short-term findings show that after 15 and 18 months, survival of transplants was 69% in a restored site and 65% and 84% in two historic ecotone sites. The restored site had significantly higher PAR (75%) than the historic ecotones (25-39%). Correspondingly, 267 seedlings have recruited at the restored site while only 8 have emerged at both historic ecotone sites. Seedling establishment was associated with higher PAR at the restored site. We found that overall population sustainability is higher at the restored site where there is the additional benefit of less maintenance. Our work suggests that a discrete restoration area can approach the historic developmental trajectory of hardwood/pine forest ecotone more closely than degraded historic ecotones themselves. We present a viable solution for conserving rare ecotone species when their natural habitat no longer exists.

Nature Serve Biotics

05/02/2017

Relatively common in the West Indies; also found in a single area of southern Dade County in Florida.