On Wednesday July 26, 2017 staff of the A. C. Moore Herbarium pushed a button that sent the total number of specimen records available for online browsing rocketing past 100,000! 

As the largest herbarium in the state of South Carolina, the A. C. Moore Herbarium in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of South Carolina boasts more than 120,000 dried plant specimens.  The ongoing effort to catalog specimen label information began around the year 2000.  Since then, the database has undergone several major upgrades and is currently maintained with Specify6.  The locally stored data are then published to two online portals 1) a Southeastern US regional portal available at www.sernecportal.org, and 2) a South Carolina portal available at http://herbarium.biol.sc.edu/floracaroliniana/.  As part of a National Science Foundation (NSF) award, the A. C. Moore Herbarium, along with several other herbaria in the state, is a collaborator in the SouthEast Regional Network of Expertise and Collections (SERNEC) which boasts a membership of over 200 herbaria.  Collectively, SERNEC is the largest Thematic Collections Network (TCN) ever funded through NSF’s Advancing the Digitization of Biodiversity Collections program.  The SERNEC TCN contributes its collections data to the national hub iDigBio (www.idigbio.org).  News of this milestone for the A. C. Moore Herbarium comes on the coattails of last week’s announcement that iDigBio had surpassed 100,000,000 specimen records.  Work continues for the herbarium staff and volunteers as they continue to mount new specimens, enter new records and add to the growing number of high-quality digital images of which more than 28,000 are currently online. 

Please check us out at www.herbarium.org or stop by Coker Life Science room 208 for a visit and maybe an impromptu tour.  You could also drop Plant Man a note at plantman@herbarium.org.  Vivat Linnaeus!

Herrick Brown and John Nelson

7/31/17