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Canada bluegrass

Poa compressa · Poaceae · all Poa records · Wikipedia

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Is this one for your yard?

Enter your ZIP to see whether this is legal to plant in your state, and whether it survives your winter.

Form: grass
Mature height: ~2 ft
Water need: moderate
Rated in: Colorado / Rocky Mountain Front Range; Global; southern Idaho / Intermountain

On this lot

1. Fire evidence and conditions

Fire evidence: Fire-resistant — location does not change the cited classification.
Fire-performance conditions
Fire ecology context
Placement evidence: 2 source placement records; source schemes remain separate.
Evidence regions: Colorado / Rocky Mountain Front Range; Global; southern Idaho / Intermountain
Maintenance

Typed publication scope: 2 scopes across 2 cited fire sources

Ignition-Resistant Landscape Plants (Fact Sheet 6.305) · Official scoped edition
- CO; partial normalized coverage · 2025-07-01
  Colorado State University Extension and the Colorado State Forest Service publish Fact Sheet 6.305 for Colorado's WUI and varied ecosystems. FireApproved exposes all 114 exact source owners at Colorado publication scope while retaining score, elevation, water, and Idaho-carrier lineage. Publication scope is not suitability for every Colorado site or zone.
Fire Resistance of Plants Master Database · Official scoped edition
- Southern Idaho (ID footprint); partial normalized coverage · 2013-11-08
  The official database labels itself "For Southern Idaho" and describes Idaho residents at the urban-rangeland interface. FireApproved publishes 419 existing plant owners that cite its scored rows. This bounded Southern Idaho scope is regional context, not statewide coverage or a conclusion that the score transfers unchanged to every Idaho site.

2. Why this plant is relevant here

State distribution: Documented in AK, AL, AR, AZ, CA, CO, CT, DC, DE, GA, HI, IA, ID, IL, IN, KS, KY, LA, MA, MD, ME, MI, MN, MO, MS, MT, NC, ND, NE, NH, NJ, NM, NV, NY, OH, OK, OR, PA, RI, SC, SD, TN, TX, UT, VA, VT, WA, WI, WV, WY.
Native range
Introduced / established: 50 sourced range or established records. This is not an invasive warning.
USDA hardiness: Documented minimum 3a; no upper limit is documented.

3. Legal, ecological, and broader status

Legal-list status
Seed-list status
Reported invasive here: 2 ecological invasive reports.
Broader regional context
Federal context

How to read this page

The status above is computed from the cited rows below: independent recommendations can support a fire-resistant result, an avoid row can produce keep-away, and disagreement stays visible as conflict. Placement notes preserve each source’s own scheme rather than translating unlike rules into one scale. This is evidence about a plant, not permission to plant it in every part of the defensible space; Zone 0 remains noncombustible.

Native and introduced range evidence

These are exact U.S. botanical-area records from the cited range source. Native and introduced describe biogeographic relationship, not fire performance or planting approval. Doubtful and extinct rows stay visible but do not count as current presence.

Current native

0

exact source areas

Current introduced

50

exact source areas

Qualified

0

doubtful or extinct source rows

50 introduced source areas · World Checklist of Vascular Plants, version 16 v16, as of 2026-06-04

Alaska (AK)
Alabama (AL)
Arkansas (AR)
Arizona (AZ)
California (CA)
Colorado (CO)
Connecticut (CT)
District of Columbia (DC)
Delaware (DE)
Georgia (GA)
Hawaii (HI)
Iowa (IA)
Idaho (ID)
Illinois (IL)
Indiana (IN)
Kansas (KS)
Kentucky (KY)
Louisiana (LA)
Massachusetts (MA)
Maryland (MD)
Maine (ME)
Michigan (MI)
Minnesota (MN)
Missouri (MO)
Mississippi (MS)
Montana (MT)
North Carolina (NC)
North Dakota (ND)
Nebraska (NE)
New Hampshire (NH)
New Jersey (NJ)
New Mexico (NM)
Nevada (NV)
New York (NY)
Ohio (OH)
Oklahoma (OK)
Oregon (OR)
Pennsylvania (PA)
Rhode I. (RI)
South Carolina (SC)
South Dakota (SD)
Tennessee (TN)
Texas (TX)
Utah (UT)
Virginia (VA)
Vermont (VT)
Washington (WA)
Wisconsin (WI)
West Virginia (WV)
Wyoming (WY)

The lossless worldwide derivative is retained once in the research corpus; object pages repeat only exact U.S. areas needed by the local lens. The JSON twin carries the same page assertions.

Plant hardiness evidence

These values describe the plant source. Your ZIP zone comes from the separate 2023 USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map. Whole-zone values stay whole-zone, and a single unresolved value is not treated as a tolerance range. Different source boundaries stay separate: overlapping statements are compared independently, while only ranges with no shared zone are called a conflict.

USDA PLANTS Database — Plant Characteristics · record POCO · PLANTS Help Document 2022; characteristics cache retrieved 2026-08-23 · as of 2026-08-26

Minimum 3a · no upper limit documented · half zone precision · derived containing band

Exact source measurement: -38°F; mapped only to its containing half-zone.

Source taxon: Poa compressa · source identifier match.

Source location: PlantCharacteristics record 24909, Temperature, Minimum (°F).

Where its sources say to plant it

Placement rules below use each source's own distances or named zones, tied to its rating. They are not interchangeable with the directory's current Zone 0 guidance.

Fire Resistance of Plants Master Database: plantable at 20' from home [Idaho minimum planting distance] (with its recommendation)
Ignition-Resistant Landscape Plants: suitable for defensible-space zones 1-2 (score 8+) [CSU defensible-space zone] (with its recommendation)

The evidence

Grouped by what each source concluded. Primary evidence rated the plant itself (a lab, field program, or original curation); corroboration compiled or republished another source's rating and resolves to its root lineage.

Listed without a rating (9)

Corroboration (9 rows from 1 source)

FLAMITS: FLAMmability plant traiTS database — Dryad / Global Ecology and Biogeography · Dryad version 9 · original source Corroboration Trait database lineage: meta-aggregator

9 cited rows from this source; its identity, lineage and tier are stated once.
- “calorific value (kcal/kg): 4632.65”
  
  FLAMITS record 4999; Combustibility measurement; plant part stems; fuel live; predrying yes; device calorimeter; site Hogenbirk1995-1; sampling june. Primary study Hogenbirk1995: Hogenbirk, J.C., & Sarrazin-Delay, C.L. (1995). Using fuel characteristics to estimate plant ignitability for fire hazard reduction. Water Air Soil Pollut, 82, 161170.
- Primary study Gao2022: Gao, X., & Schwilk, D. W. (2022). Burn hot or tolerate trees: flammability decreases with shade tolerance in grasses. Oikos, 4, e08930.
  
  Shared row context: plant part whole plant; fuel live; predrying no; device burning bench; site Gao2022-1; sampling spring 2019.
  - Shared measurement context: Ignitability measurement.
    - “time to flaming (s): 1.98”
      
      FLAMITS record 15989.
    - “time to flaming (s): 1.322”
      
      FLAMITS record 15993.
  - Shared measurement context: Sustainability measurement.
    - “flaming duration (s): 20.888”
      
      FLAMITS record 15990.
    - “smouldering duration (s): 56.694”
      
      FLAMITS record 15991.
    - “flaming duration (s): 13.148”
      
      FLAMITS record 15994.
    - “smouldering duration (s): 62.796”
      
      FLAMITS record 15995.
  - Shared measurement context: Combustibility measurement.
    - “flame height (cm): 17.8”
      
      FLAMITS record 15992.
    - “flame height (cm): 25.4”
      
      FLAMITS record 15996.

Last verified 2026-08-23. JSON (CC BY 4.0)

Profiles: USDA PLANTS · GBIF · iNaturalist · Wikidata · Wikipedia · ITIS

Poa compressa (Canada Bluegrass). FireApproved. https://fireapproved.com/plants/poa-compressa/. Last verified 2026-08-23.