Rubber Plant Climate DNA: Native Habitat Profile

The quality-filtered native-record profile for Ficus elastica centers on 25.8°C annual mean temperature and 1868 mm annual precipitation. Its robust p10–p90 climate envelope is wider than those two medians: the coldest-month minimum spans 6.0–22.9°C, while modeled annual rainfall spans 957–3404 mm.

This is a computed environmental fingerprint built from 30 spatially thinned climate points attached to filtered GBIF records inside the POWO native range of Nepal to western Yunnan and western Malesia. It describes where retained records occur in long-term gridded climate; it is not an indoor-care prescription or a physiological tolerance test.

Rubber Plant Climate DNA at a glance

The source plant is described as a wet-tropical tree. That botanical context matters because the same regional rainfall, humidity, or radiation can be experienced very differently by a climber, epiphyte, geophyte, tree, or succulent. The page therefore reports the climate evidence without turning it into a universal potting or watering formula.

What stands out in the computed profile

• Temperature center: The annual-mean median is 25.8°C, with the middle 50% of sampled points between 22.5 and 26.6°C. In this model that is a hot annual baseline.
• Cold and heat edges: The robust outer envelope runs from 6.0°C at the p10 coldest-month minimum to 36.9°C at the p90 warmest-month maximum. The 30.9°C span is broad; it is an occurrence-climate span, not a laboratory tolerance range.
• Rainfall volume: Median modeled annual precipitation is 1868 mm, while the p10–p90 range is 957–3404 mm. The wet end is 3.6 times the dry end, evidence that one annual total would hide real geographic variation.
• Rainfall timing: The precipitation-seasonality median is 73.8 CV, placing this record set in the strongly seasonal band used by this renderer. That describes variation through the year, not how often to water a pot.
• Atmosphere and open sky: Relative humidity centers on 62.6%, while solar radiation centers on 17.9 MJ/m²/day. Both are gridded outdoor climate values; neither reports the humidity or light at an indoor leaf.

Together, those observations describe the climate attached to retained records of Ficus elastica. They do not establish the species’ physiological limits, and they should not be converted directly into thermostat, humidifier, or watering targets.

Native-record climate envelope

The outer p10–p90 values are a robust descriptive envelope; the middle p25–p75 band shows where the central half of sampled climate values falls. Neither band is an “ideal range.” Occurrence density, collection effort, native-range boundaries, coordinate quality, and CHELSA grid resolution all shape what appears here.

A recent hourly reference: Canggu, Bali, 2015–2025

The same fixed reference is attached to every profile in this release: 96,432 complete hourly ERA5 rows for temperature, relative humidity, precipitation, and 10-meter wind at -8.65°, 115.13°. Using one place and one period makes cross-plant comparisons consistent. It does not claim that Canggu is native habitat for Ficus elastica.

Across the three comparable annual signals, the Canggu median falls inside 2 of 3 native-record p10–p90 envelopes. The Canggu archive’s annual median wind speed is 10.6 km/h; wind is reported as local context rather than matched to the CHELSA profile because the native data contract does not yet include a comparable wind variable.

The eleven annual values preserve year-to-year spread that a single climatological number would hide. Hourly values were aggregated into calendar years before annual percentiles were calculated. This recent reference is useful for comparing an outdoor place with the long-term native-record envelope, but neither layer should be translated directly into an indoor watering schedule.

Occurrence footprint and geographic coverage

The CHELSA climate-extraction sample covers 29 quarter-degree grid cells across the native-country filter (BD, BT, CN, ID, IN, LA, MM, MY, NP, TH, VN). Its coordinate bounds run from -6.918° to 38.073° latitude and 72.672° to 127.500° longitude. Bounds show sampled coverage, not the legal or botanical outline of the species’ range.

Recorded rejection counts were coordinate uncertainty: 9, cultivated or introduced: 2, license: 176. The pipeline also constrains records to the POWO native-country list, removes duplicate spatial cells, and retains the source timestamp and record-set hash. A low count can be scientifically honest: it is better to expose weak coverage than to fill the gap with invented precision.

How this profile compares inside its 10-plant cluster

Within this release cluster, Rubber Plant ranks #1 of 10 for median coldest-month temperature, #1 for annual-mean temperature, #5 for annual precipitation, #2 for precipitation seasonality, and #7 for usable climate-point sample size. Ranks compare only the ten selected profiles and are descriptive, not measures of plant quality or indoor difficulty.

The closest profiles in the same normalized seven-variable comparison are:

• Sweet Basil Climate DNA — normalized climate distance 0.273
• Taro Elephant Ear Climate DNA — normalized climate distance 0.676
• Prayer Plant Climate DNA — normalized climate distance 0.731

The cluster was selected deterministically: the remaining ten profiles after the current 20-plant dataset is split at the median coldest-month temperature. This keeps the collection rule reproducible and prevents an editorial label from overriding the data.

What this can—and cannot—change about care

Native-record climate can improve the questions you ask. For Ficus elastica, the wet rainfall median and strongly seasonal precipitation signal indicate that annual rain volume alone is incomplete. Indoors, substrate structure, pot volume, root density, airflow, temperature, and actual light determine drying. Never convert millimeters of regional rainfall into a weekly watering interval.

The same limit applies to temperature, humidity, and solar radiation. CHELSA describes outdoor long-term grid cells; glass, walls, heating, air conditioning, shade, and distance from a window create a different microclimate. Use this profile to understand the source evidence and to frame observations, then use the Rubber Plant care guide for practical indoor-care context.

Confidence and limits

Confidence is medium (58/100). The score reflects sample size, spatial coverage, and coordinate-precision reporting in this pipeline version. It is not a probability that the numbers are “correct,” and it does not measure how well a particular plant will perform in a particular home.

Important limits remain: GBIF is a record of observations and specimens, not a balanced field survey; a native-country filter is coarser than a verified native-range polygon; historical and cultivated records can be difficult to classify; CHELSA values are modeled long-term normals rather than sensor readings at each plant. The page reports ranges and provenance so those constraints remain visible.

Continue from the data

• Rubber Plant care guide
• Rubber Plant climate guides by city
• This 10-plant Climate DNA collection
• Sweet Basil Climate DNA — normalized climate distance 0.273
• Taro Elephant Ear Climate DNA — normalized climate distance 0.676
• Prayer Plant Climate DNA — normalized climate distance 0.731