Digitaria ciliaris
species of plant
Digitaria ciliaris is a species of grass known by the common names southern crabgrass, tropical finger-grass, tropical crabgrass or summer grass.
The grass is known as "ගුරු තණ - guru thana" in Sri Lanka.
Distribution and habitat
Digitaria ciliaris is a tough plant, believed to have originated in Asia but now found all over the tropical belt of the planet, as well as in many temperate regions of both hemispheres. This grass is an invasive species considered an aggressive weed in certain countries, including China, Mexico and the United States.
This species has been observed growing in habitats such as coastal dunes, tidal marshes, and saw palmetto flats.
Together with Portulaca oleracea, Ipomoea pes-caprae and Wollastonia biflora, Digitaria ciliaris is usually one of the first species colonizing degraded or altered environments in tropical zones of the planet.
Description
This grass is an annual plant that can grow up to 1 m tall but is usually much shorter. The roots are at the nodes and the stems produce runners that allow the plant to grow fast forming scruffy-looking patches about 1 m across and half a metre in height. The leaves are linear to linear-ovate narrowing at the tip to 15 centimeters long. The inflorescence is at the top of a long stem, usually much taller than the leaves, with two to nine 5–10 cm long sub-digitate racemes.
“Digitaria ciliaris” enters the record as species of plant. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Digitaria, ciliaris and species can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Digitaria ciliaris” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Digitaria, ciliaris and species provides the most credible route into that argument.
Stable identifiers, scientific names and standards terminology offer the best bridge between this overview and specialist evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 26, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q8559911. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Digitaria ciliaris” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.