Hesperocyparis (western cypress) is a genus of trees in the family Cupressaceae, containing North American species otherwise assigned to the genus Cupressus. They are found throughout western North America. Only a few species have wide ranges, with most being restricted-range endemics.
Hesperocyparis (western cypress) is a genus of trees in the family Cupressaceae, containing North American species otherwise assigned to the genus Cupressus. They are found throughout western North America. Only a few species have wide ranges, with most being restricted-range endemics.
== Taxonomy == Members of Hesperocyparis were and still are placed in Cupressus by many authorities, but phylogenetic evidence supports a different affinity. A 2021 molecular study found Hesperocyparis to be the sister group to the genus Callitropsis (containing only the Nootka cypress), with this clade being sister to the Asian genus Xanthocyparis, containing only the Vietnamese golden cypress. The clade comprising all three genera was found to be sister to a clade containing Juniperus and Cupressus sensu stricto. If Hesperocyparis and the other smaller genera were reunited with Cupressus it may also require them to be merged into a larger genus including Juniperus.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).