[{"content":"If you are holding one of our collection kits, this is the page the QR code points at.\nOpen the collection form \u0026rarr; The form asks exactly the same questions as the paper data sheet in your kit, in the same order. Use whichever you prefer. You do not need to do both.\nThe whole job, in six lines # Two leaves from each of about 25 plants. Fewer is fine if 25 are hard to find. Spread out across the whole patch, not 25 plants from one corner. Leaves go straight into a numbered small bag. The drying beads are already in it. Seal it tightly, right away, then into the gallon bag. One gallon bag per population. Fill in the form above or the paper data sheet, whichever you prefer. Mail the samples and data sheet back in the prepaid box. Keep the scissors and pencil. Please minimise disturbance to the site and the plants as best you can.\nRecording where you are # Drop a pin at the middle of the patch on Google or Apple Maps and read the coordinates off it, or let your phone geotag a photo taken at the patch. Either is fine.\nWe do not publish these coordinates. They stay in the project\u0026rsquo;s private records. Nothing finer than a state or province appears anywhere on this site, and the same applies to anything we publish. Fringed gentian localities are treated as sensitive, and we treat them that way too.\nMaking sure it is the right plant # The species most often confused with G. crinita is G. virgata (the narrow-leaved or lesser fringed gentian), and in a few places the two grow together and hybridise. The quickest tells are leaf width and how deeply the corolla lobes are fringed. Four leads in this project have already turned out to be virgata rather than crinita, so it is worth a second look.\nIf you are unsure, photograph a flower face-on and a whole plant and send them to us. That is how we confirm every site.\nSee the photo gallery for reference images.\nSending photos # We would love photos of a flower, a whole plant, and the site, emailed to jbenning@cornell.edu with your site name. The flower photo is how we confirm the species, and the good ones may end up on this site with your name on them (we will ask you first).\nQuestions # John Benning, jbenning@cornell.edu — call or text 252-915-8786.\n","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/collect/","section":"Fringed Gentian","summary":"If you are holding one of our collection kits, this is the page the QR code points at.\nOpen the collection form → The form asks exactly the same questions as the paper data sheet in your kit, in the same order. Use whichever you prefer. You do not need to do both.\n","title":"Collecting","type":"page"},{"content":" Site under construction A range-wide study of the fringed gentian # This will be the home of the fringed gentian project, a range-wide study of Gentianopsis crinita run by the Agrawal and Benning labs at Cornell University, together with botanists, land managers and naturalists across eastern North America.\nG. crinita flowers late, in wet meadows and fens from Manitoba to Georgia, and then dies. Every plant is a biennial that will not be there the following year. Populations wink in and out; some are large and old, and many are small, isolated, and becoming more so. We are trying to work out how those populations are related to each other, how much genetic variation each one still holds, and which are isolated enough to be at risk.\nThat question can only be answered at the scale of the whole range, which is why this is a collaboration with dozens of people who already know where the plants are, rather than one field crew trying to be everywhere in the three weeks the species is in flower.\nPhotos by Ella Mancino and Anurag Agrawal. More → What will be here # Where we\u0026rsquo;re sampling — which parts of the range are covered and which are still gaps. This one is already worth a look. The project — what we are asking and why this species. Photos — the plant, its pollinators, and the meadows it grows in. Collecting — everything a collector needs, and the online data form that the collection kits will point at. The form is not open yet. News — notes from the field as the collection comes in this autumn. Collections run from late August into early October 2026.\nQuestions, or know a population? John Benning, jbenning@cornell.edu.\n","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/","section":"Fringed Gentian","summary":" Site under construction A range-wide study of the fringed gentian # This will be the home of the fringed gentian project, a range-wide study of Gentianopsis crinita run by the Agrawal and Benning labs at Cornell University, together with botanists, land managers and naturalists across eastern North America.\n","title":"Fringed Gentian","type":"page"},{"content":"Notes from the field, and how the collection is going.\n","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/","section":"News","summary":"Notes from the field, and how the collection is going.\n","title":"News","type":"posts"},{"content":"Fringed gentian flowers from late August into early October, which is late enough that plenty of people who walk past it all summer have never seen it open. Click any photo for a larger version.\nCorolla face-on, showing the fringed lobes the species is named for.\nPhoto: Ella Mancino Whole plants against the sky, with goldenrod alongside.\nPhoto: Ella Mancino A patch in habitat — several plants scattered through the vegetation.\nPhoto: Ella Mancino A bumblebee working an open flower.\nPhoto: Ella Mancino A dark bee deep in the corolla with full pollen loads.\nPhoto: Ella Mancino A multi-flowered plant with asters, water behind.\nPhoto: Anurag Agrawal A flower opened by hand, showing the anthers and stigma.\nPhoto: Anurag Agrawal Flower face-on against a dark background.\nPhoto: Anurag Agrawal Open flower from an oblique angle, anthers visible.\nPhoto: Anurag Agrawal A multi-flowered plant, full stem.\nPhoto: Ella Mancino Buds and one opening flower, 31 August — the very start of the season.\nPhoto: Ella Mancino A single bud just cracking open.\nPhoto: Ella Mancino Two flowers opening on one stem.\nPhoto: Ella Mancino An open flower from directly above.\nPhoto: Ella Mancino Using these # These photos belong to the people who took them. If you would like to use one, for a newsletter, a talk, a preserve sign, ask us and we will put you in touch. We are happy to say yes; we just want the photographer to know.\nSending us yours # If you collect for this project, or just know a population, we would love your photos, especially a flower face-on, a whole plant, and the site itself. Email them to jbenning@cornell.edu with the site name.\nTwo things worth knowing. We strip the location data out of every photo before it goes on this site, so a geotagged phone photo will not give the site away. And we will always ask you before putting a photo up, and it will carry your name when we do.\n","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/photos/","section":"Fringed Gentian","summary":"Fringed gentian flowers from late August into early October, which is late enough that plenty of people who walk past it all summer have never seen it open. Click any photo for a larger version.\n","title":"Photos","type":"page"},{"content":"","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Tags","type":"tags"},{"content":" Why this species # Gentianopsis crinita is a biennial of wet meadows, fens, old fields and roadside seeps across eastern North America. It germinates one year, flowers the next, and dies. There is no long-lived adult stage to buffer a bad year, and the seed bank is short-lived, so population sizes swing hard between years and local extinctions are ordinary rather than exceptional.\nThat makes it a good species for a question that matters well beyond gentians: what happens to the genetics of a plant that is not rare enough to be a conservation priority, but is patchy, declining in places, and increasingly cut off from its neighbours? Most of what we know about population genetics in fragmented landscapes comes from either very common species or very rare ones. The fringed gentian sits in the middle, where a lot of the flora actually lives.\nWhat we are doing # We are collecting a small amount of leaf tissue from roughly fifty populations across the range, sequencing it, and using it to ask:\nHow are populations related? Where are the deep splits across the range, and do they line up with anything, glacial history, habitat type, or nothing at all? How much genetic variation does each population still hold? Small isolated populations are expected to have lost variation. We want to know how much, and whether it tracks current population size or something older. Which populations are isolated? Not isolated on a map, but isolated genetically, which is the thing that actually matters for their future. None of these questions can be answered from one site, or one state. A single field crew could not reach fifty populations in the few weeks they are in flower, in a year when many of them may not appear at all. So we asked the people who already know where the plants are.\nProvenance matters, and it is the hard part # Fringed gentian is a popular species to sow. Seed gets scattered in restorations, in remnants, and sometimes in nature preserves, and the record of it is often lost. A population that was planted from seed collected 50 miles away tells us about a gardener\u0026rsquo;s choices, not about the species\u0026rsquo; history.\nSo a large part of this project is unglamorous: asking, for every single site, whether anyone has ever added seed or plants to it. Where the answer is yes or unknown, we either dig into the records or leave the site out. Several promising populations have been set aside on exactly this basis. We would rather have forty well-documented populations than sixty of mixed provenance.\nWho is involved # The project is led by the Agrawal and Benning labs in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University.\nThe collecting is being done by botanists, preserve managers, heritage-program staff and naturalists across more than twenty states and provinces. Their names will appear here, and on the resulting papers, as the work comes in.\nIf you know a fringed gentian population and would like to be part of this, we would be glad to hear from you: jbenning@cornell.edu.\n","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/about/","section":"Fringed Gentian","summary":"Why this species # Gentianopsis crinita is a biennial of wet meadows, fens, old fields and roadside seeps across eastern North America. It germinates one year, flowers the next, and dies. There is no long-lived adult stage to buffer a bad year, and the seed bank is short-lived, so population sizes swing hard between years and local extinctions are ordinary rather than exceptional.\n","title":"The project","type":"page"},{"content":"The pale green is roughly where fringed gentian has been recorded. Each circle is one state or province, sized by how many populations we have in the study and coloured by how far along we are. Click one for detail.\nGreen with no circle on it is a gap: somewhere the species grows and we have nobody lined up. Those are the parts of this map we would most like to change.\nCollector confirmed Looking for a collector Historical records only Recorded range (GBIF) What the green actually is # Every G. crinita record in GBIF as of February 2026, 2,766 of them, binned into half-degree cells. It is a coarse picture and it is meant to be. Cells holding a single record with no occupied neighbour are dropped, because at this scale those are almost entirely georeferencing errors, and the remaining cells are then expanded slightly so nearby records read as one shape rather than a scatter of squares.\nThe effect is that the green overstates the edges by up to about 50 km and understates the far north, where genuine but isolated records get dropped along with the errors. Treat it as the shape of the range, not its boundary.\nPublishing this layer is safe in a way the rest of our locality data is not: GBIF records are already public, and the iNaturalist observations among them already have their coordinates obscured at source before they ever reach GBIF.\nWhy the circles are deliberately coarse # These are not the locations of any plants. There is one circle per state or province, and it sits at the median of that state\u0026rsquo;s public GBIF records so that it falls somewhere the species actually grows. A state\u0026rsquo;s true geographic centre would often be far outside the range: Manitoba\u0026rsquo;s is some 500 km north of any fringed gentian.\nThat placement is computed from GBIF alone. It carries no information about where our populations are. Virginia has no records in the GBIF extract, so its circle falls back to the geographic centre and sits outside the green, which is itself telling: Virginia\u0026rsquo;s populations were last seen in the 1980s and 90s.\nWe have exact coordinates for many of these populations, given to us in confidence by the people who know them. Fringed gentian localities are obscured on iNaturalist because the species is treated as sensitive, and publishing precise sites would undo that for the people who trusted us with them. So the finest resolution anything on this site will ever show is the one above.\nWhat the colours mean # Collector confirmed means at least one person in that state or province has agreed to collect for us. It does not mean the tissue is in hand, or that every permit is settled.\nLooking for a collector means we know of populations there and are still working out who can reach them, or waiting on permission from whoever owns the ground.\nHistorical records only means the species has been recorded there but has not been found recently, and we do not currently expect to sample it. West Virginia is the live case: its one known extant site went unfound in 2025, and whether it reappears will not be known until October.\nThis is a snapshot of an active project and it goes out of date. Last rebuilt from the project records on 10 August 2026, against a GBIF extract from February 2026.\n","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/map/","section":"Fringed Gentian","summary":"The pale green is roughly where fringed gentian has been recorded. Each circle is one state or province, sized by how many populations we have in the study and coloured by how far along we are. Click one for detail.\n","title":"Where we're sampling","type":"page"}]