Single Record
Participant Info
- Species
- Helianthus petiolaris [Helianthus petiolaris subsp. fallax]
- Family
- Asteraceae
- CommonName
- prairie sunflower
- Presence
- YES
- Status
- native
- EarliestDate
- 1898
- LatestDate
- 2019
- Ecosystem
- basin, shrubland, foothill, ruderal
- Geobotanical
- SSawatch, SSanjuans, NCristos, UBasin, LBasin
- Counties
- Alamosa, Conejos, Costilla, Mineral, Rio Grande, Saguache
- Passes
- WildlifePreserves
- Baca, Blanca Wetlands, Great Sand Dunes
- Other Localities
- PhotoRecords
- YES Rich Haswell: Rio Grande Co, Limekiln Peak 5.6 air miles SW of Del Norte 25 Aug 2019
- Comments
- In the Watershed, prairie sunflower is a common Basin and foothill plant, often found along road sides and on volcanic slopes. An area often collected is around and in the Great Sand Dunes NP. (Note that Peter Innes and colleagues at the Kane Laboratory at the University of Colorado, studying H. petiolaris in and around the Great Sand Dunes, have found differences between the plants that grow in open or unstabilized sand and those that grow in stabilized sand on the periphery of the dunes. The first are larger in height and leaf size, lateral roots, and seeds (nearly twice as large). As for the USA distribution, "prairie" is somewhat of a misnomer, since the species is as wide spread in the Rocky Mountains and desert Southwest as in the Great Plains. It is adventive in all other USA states except for those of the Deep South. It follows the Rio Grande drainage through New Mexico into the Big Bend country of Texas.
- Annotation