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.
Green 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.
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.
The 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.
Publishing 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.
Why 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’s public GBIF records so that it falls somewhere the species actually grows. A state’s true geographic centre would often be far outside the range: Manitoba’s is some 500 km north of any fringed gentian.
That 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’s populations were last seen in the 1980s and 90s.
We 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.
What 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.
Looking 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.
Historical 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.
This 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.