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The new site offers several benefits over the existing website, including real coordinate mapping, giving a clearer view of the density of documentation as well as more precision about plant distributions and their link to landforms. We will also have the ability to update species pages more regularly, both in terms of new collections and as more existing Michigan specimens are georeferenced. In addition, we have a better photo display, and offer indented keys.

C. Peirce

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Aster umbellatus of Michigan Flora.

This is one of our most distinctive asters and is common throughout the state, although in some areas such as the northernmost Lower Peninsula quite local. Borders and openings in moist forests, swamps (conifers, hardwoods), and thickets (willows, alders, etc.); oak-hickory, aspen-pine, and mixed forests; along streams and rivers, sedge meadows and fens, shores, ditches, marshy flats, swales; rock shores of Lake Superior.

Pubescence varies a great deal in this species. Plants with leaves glabrous beneath (except on the midrib) are var. umbellata and occur from the southern border of the state to Keweenaw Co., apparently absent only from the westernmost Upper Peninsula and Isle Royale. Plants with leaves pubescent across the lower surface are var. pubens (A. Gray) Britton and occur throughout the Upper Peninsula, with scattered occurrences as far south as the middle of the Lower Peninsula.

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