Fringed Gentian

Site under construction

A range-wide study of the fringed gentian

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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.

G. 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.

That 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.

Photos by Ella Mancino and Anurag Agrawal. More →

What will be here

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• Where we’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.

Questions, or know a population? John Benning, jbenning@cornell.edu.