Palm ID Key

Identification tool to adult palms cultivated in the U.S, Hawaii and Caribbean

Palm ID Key is designed to help users identify cultivated palms. The ability to identify a palm host is an important aid to pest and disease identification, as many diseases and pests may be host specific. Palm ID Key supports users that may only have a portion of a complete representative sample of a plant. This key allows users to identify many specimens to species, though this is not possible in all cases, as many palms are capable of hybridizing.

The intended audience for this key is non-experts working in the field within Cooperative Agriculture Pest Survey (CAPS), National Plant Diagnostic Network (NPDN), and other national, regional, and state agricultural agencies/organizations with responsibilities associated with pest and disease survey and detection. However, the key will be useful for anyone who manages palms in a nursery or landscape setting. All features in the key can be used with the naked eye or a hand lens.

Information is provided for 82 commonly cultivated palm species from 48 genera, but given the difficulty of separating palm species and the number of hybrids among them, you might only be able to determine the genus for a particular palm. Only adult palms (not seedlings or pre-reproductive juvenile palms) are included in the key and descriptions. The key is illustrated with hundreds of images of species and their characteristics or features. This key provides identification support for palms that are commonly cultivated, as of 2010, in the United States (continental U.S. and Hawaii) and Caribbean Islands.

Mary Andrews contributed the image for the splash page. All other acknowledgements are available at the URL shown below.

Key author: Patti Anderson

This key is part of a complete Identifying Commonly Cultivated Palms tool : http://idtools.org/id/palms/palm-id/

Lucid Mobile key developed by USDA APHIS ITP