This service is available at no charge* for sites within Richland County, thanks to a partnership between the A. C. Moore Herbarium and the Richland Soil and Water Conservation District. Consultations are limited in number and some restrictions apply. For more information or to schedule your consultation, contact Dr. John Nelson at 803-777-8196 or nelson@sc.edu.

*A tax-deductible donation to the Herbarium Endowment is encouraged.

Downloadable Flyer (.pdf)

the Plants & Planter web site brings together the largest remaining intact portion of his vascular plant collection (about 6,000 specimens), his 13 bound journals (written from 1859-1887), and over 400 letters written to and from Ravenel. Explore the world of this renown scholar and learn more about his important contributions to Science in the 19^th-Century South.

was described by South Carolina botanists John Nelson and Doug Rayner; their findings were published in December 2014 (see "A New Hedge-Nettle (Stachys: Lamiaceae) from South Carolina, U.S.A." Journal of the Botanical Research Institute of Texas. 8(2):431-440.) First collected in 1977 by Dr. Rayner, the curious specimen remained unidentified beyond its assignment to the genus Stachys for a number of years. It was not until 1990 that a separate population of similar-looking plants was discovered by Dr. Nelson that the authors suspected that it may actually be a previously undescribed species. Both populations occur along the Santee river (one in Charleston County, the other in Georgetown County). While both populations were found on protected lands, the species may be one of South Carolina's rarest plant species. Commonly referred to as a 'Hedge-Nettle' the species is a member of the mint family.

Project Title:
The Key to the Cabinets: Building and Sustaining a Research Database for a Global Biodiversity Hotspot.
Project Description: :
The southeastern USA is botanically rich, with areas of high global biodiversity in both the Appalachians and the coastal plain. Millions of plant specimens have been collected from this region over the past four centuries, and these specimens and the information they contain currently reside in museums, or herbaria, at universities across the area. Scientists study these specimens intently; however, it is difficult to retrieve information at broad geographic and taxonomic scales without pipelines to move the information electronically from the specimen to an accessible pool of data. SERNEC, or the SouthEast Regional Network of Expertise and Collections, is a large regional network of botanical experts and collections that has, through an NSF-sponsored research coordination network (RCN) project, developed critical skills in biodiversity informatics. The current project will allow the SERNEC group to make data available for over 3 million specimens using the latest photography and information capture tools and to engage citizen scientists and students to assist in transcribing and georeferencing this large dataset. The research generated through this project can help regional planners, land managers and communities to manage their natural resources in our ever-changing environment.

The interaction of scientists, citizen scientists, and students will provide a synergy to build a research tool of an unparalleled scale and scope. The ultimate goal of this project is to develop an imaged and databased set of over 3 million specimens from over 100 herbaria in one of the most floristically diverse regions in North America and a global hotspot of plant diversity. This will represent a valuable data source for research on the response of vegetation to climate change, human development, and rapid migrations of introduced species. This region has been a biodiversity hotspot for 100 million years and this project should encourage research on changes over time to develop better predictive models as areas of biodiversity change. By partnering with Symbiota, Notes from Nature, GEOLocate, Adler Planetarium, iPlant/TACC, and Specify, the project will develop ways to best integrate various efforts for data accessibility. This award is made as part of the National Resource for Digitization of Biological Collections through the Advancing Digitization of Biological Collections program, and all data resulting from this award will be available through the national resource (iDigBio.org).

The A. C. Moore Herbarium at the University of South Carolina - Columbia, along with the Clemson University Herbarium, will serve as lead institutions within SC in collaboration with seven other collections that make up the Consortium of South Carolina Herbaria. Their combined contribution to this 12-state biodiversity database project will include just over 286,000 specimens of plant species that are endemic to the Southeastern US.

Project Title:
Plants and Planter: Henry William Ravenel and the Convergence of Science and Agriculture in the Nineteenth-Century South.
Project Description: :
This project involves the digitization and reunification of over 6,200 plant specimens and nearly 5,000 pages of documents collected or created by South Carolinian naturalist Henry William Ravenel (1814-1887). The resulting digital collection will allow full-text searching and browsing by subject heading for archival materials and provide a map to browse the locations where botanical specimens were collected.

The collaboration with USC libraries involves more explicitly the South Caroliniana Library which holds Ravenel's handwritten journals and Digital Collections Staff who will be scanning those volumes. The final synthesized product built with help from the Center for Digital Humanities will be an online portal that allows for cross referencing Ravenel's specimens with journal entries in addition to related content.