during the 2018 email exchanges with botanical garden staff. The document had been sent to all institutional members of the Georgia Plant Conservation Alliance (GPCA), and it was signed by six members, including staff from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Georgia Department of Natural Resources. The consequences for Barlow and other Torreya Guardians were made clear in the final paragraph:"GPCA members and Botanical Guardian volunteers are advised to be cautious when speaking to any members of Torreya Guardians. They have taken advantage of professional courtesies, making broad claims from simple correspondence, and linking their work with members of the GPCA. GPCA is publicly distancing itself from Torreya Guardians and their methods of rewilding an endangered species outside its range." Seeds accessed by citizens Citizen collection and use of endangered plant seeds produced in horticultural settings are exempt from restrictions in the U.S. Endangered Species Act. In the case of Florida torreya, the 65-year-old grove at Biltmore Gardens near Asheville, North Carolina, produced enough seeds in 2005 such that the managers donated 110 seeds to a newly formed citizen group. Donations to Torreya Guardians culminated in 2009, when the group received 300 Biltmore seeds. The controversy accelerated in 2008 when Audubon Magazine sent a journalist and a photographer to document the group's planting of 31 potted seedlings into private forested lands near Waynesville, North Carolina. In general, media coverage of Torreya Guardians as the first example of an assisted migration project underway presented the information as a human-interest story or tilted toward publishing favorable quotations by or about the citizen action. Examples include: Boston Globe (2008), Orion (2008), Wildlife in North Carolina (2009), Audubon (2010), Los Angeles Times (2011), Landscape Architecture (2014), The Economist (2015), Earth Island Journal (2018), Sierra (2018). In contrast, academics and other professionals publishing in journals (and the media that cover academic topics) trended toward caution, with a near-universal theme that professionals should develop policy frameworks to aid with decisionmaking — and that managers in charge of species recovery should begin making use of those frameworks. Examples that included mention of the Torreya taxifolia controversy were: Conservation Biology (2007, 2010, 2020), Trends in Ecology and Evolution (2009), Nature Climate Change (2008), Nature (2011, 2017), Scientific American (2009), Ecological Applications (2010), BioScience (2012), Science (2010, 2016), Yale Journal on Regulation (2010), Forestry Chronicle (2011), Conservation Letters (2010, 2013, 2017), The Conversation (2021). In 2013 Torreya Guardians