Collaborative Research: Research Infrastructure: Bringing historic collections into the 21st century: Digitization of Southeastern Lepidopteran collections

Awards are made to the University of South Carolina, College of Charleston, and Dalton State College to enable digitization and dissemination, to public and professionals, of important data from collections of historical and modern moth specimens. In addition, historical photographs, letters, and artifacts relevant to the specimens will be made available publicly. The project will also provide training for undergraduate students in museum research, databasing, and natural history. These students will be given the opportunity to attend and present research at a local entomological conference. Our knowledge of the fauna across the United States is patchy, with certain important and diverse regions having little existing data available. The Southeastern Coastal Plain of Georgia and the Carolinas is exceptionally diverse in insects, yet few researchers have documented it. A notable exception was Richard Dominick, who led a massive collecting effort in South Carolina’s Santee Delta between 1965 and 1976. His collection of ~30,000 moths and butterflies is held at the University of South Carolina but has not been databased nor has any data from it ever made publicly accessible. This project’s primary aim is to photograph and database every specimen held in that collection. The second aim is to digitize modern collections from both the Santee Delta and other under sampled regions of South Carolina and Georgia (Sapelo Island and NW Georgia). In totality, this project will greatly increase the available knowledge of the insect fauna of the Southeastern United States. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.