Dixie Damrel, Clemson University Herbarium curator, displays some of the 100,000-plus dried plant specimens in the collection. Image Credit: P. Kent/Clemson University.
The Times and Democrat released an article Sunday (October 26, 2014), that highlights the Clemson University Herbarium’s involvement in an NSF funded, four year project to digitize herbarium specimens.
The Clemson University Herbarium is one of nine herbaria in South Carolina, and 45 collections across the southeast, that are collaborating as part of the newly funded Thematic Collections Network (TCN): The Key to the Cabinets: Building and Sustaining a Research Database for a Global Biodiversity Hotspot. This new TCN aims to develop an imaged and databased set of over three million plant specimens from over 100 herbaria in one of the “most floristically diverse regions in North America”. The TCN is part of SERNEC (SouthEast Regional Network of Expertise and Collections), a consortium of 233 herbaria in 13 states located in the southeastern USA.
This newly funded TCN project is part of a national digitization effort of over 200 institutions that will increase collection data accessibility for researchers, educators, and the public through the iDigBio Specimen Portal.
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