ngaio tree

invasive record needs a separate reading.

Ngaio, Myoporum laetum, is a tree whose 2016 shoot study places it toward the less flammable end of a comparison of 60 tree and shrub species. The grouping combines burn time, maximum temperature, burnt biomass and ignition frequency. It describes how prepared samples behaved together across those measures.

The researchers took 70 cm terminal branches from healthy plants and air-dried them for 24 hours. On the grill, shoots received two minutes of preheating and ten seconds of blowtorch exposure. Sustained flaming after the torch was removed determined whether a sample had ignited. Ngaio’s row contains six samples. Separate subsamples went into a 65°C oven for 48 hours to measure moisture; the branches being burned received the air-drying treatment.

A separate FLAMITS observation, attributed to Cui’s 2020 study, records 75% ignition frequency for ngaio branches. Those branches were predried and preheated with propane-butane burners on a grill, then exposed to a propane-butane blowtorch. The retained database row omits the replicate denominator, exposure durations and sustained-ignition criterion. Wyse’s timing cannot fill those gaps, so the percentage cannot serve as a numerical translation of the earlier low/moderate group.

Ecological establishment adds another consideration. The U.S. Geological Survey’s retained 2022 US-RIIS register records ngaio as introduced and invasive, category D2, in the aggregate conterminous 48 United States region. Its taxon modification and distribution event date are 2017-11-21. That regional entry does not say the tree occurs in every state or impose a legal planting ban. The separate introduced-California record has its own geographic scope.

The experimental classification therefore answers a combustion question about prepared shoots. A planting choice also encounters the ecological invasion record: favorable fire evidence does not settle that separate question.