Phytolacca americana
American pokeweed
Accumulation profile
Rare Earth Elements Facultative
1,040 µg g⁻¹ DW
1× the rare earth elements threshold
Other rare earth elements accumulators →
- Substrate
- REE-rich mine soils
- Habitat
- Disturbed ground near REE workings
- Distribution
- North America, naturalised in China
- First reported
- 2018 · Yuan et al.
- Verification
- primary-measured
Description & ecology
Promoted to primary-measured 2026-09-06: Yuan et al. (2018, International Journal of Phytoremediation 20:415–423, doi:10.1080/15226514.2017.1365336) studied naturally grown pokeweed in the Dingnan ion-adsorption REE mining district, Jiangxi, China, and state in their abstract: 'plant REEs concentrations varied among the sampling sites and can reach 1040 mg/kg in the leaves.' Independently corroborated by Goudard et al. (2024, Annals of Botany 133:573–584): 'a total leaf concentration of 1040 µg REEs g−1 (Yuan et al., 2018)'.
Caveat: the journal full text is paywalled, so the value is verified at abstract level (verbatim sentence), not against the data table; the year is corrected from the previously stored 2019 to 2018.
References
- Yuan, M., Liu, C., Liu, W.-S., Guo, M.-N., Morel, J. L., Huot, H., Yu, H.-J., Tang, Y.-T., & Qiu, R.-L. (2018). Accumulation and fractionation of rare earth elements (REEs) in the naturally grown Phytolacca americana L. in southern China. International Journal of Phytoremediation, 20, 415–423. doi:10.1080/15226514.2017.1365336
- Reeves, R. D., Baker, A. J. M., Jaffré, T., Erskine, P. D., Echevarria, G., & van der Ent, A. (2018). A global database for plants that hyperaccumulate metal and metalloid trace elements. New Phytologist, 218, 407–411. doi:10.1111/nph.14907