Brian Scholtens
College of Charleston, SC·Ecology & Evolution
Knowledge of which insects live where in the United States is patchy. Some regions with very high diversity have little recorded data.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Biology
- Topics
Lepidoptera
moths
butterflies
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Photograph and database all ~30,000 specimens in the Richard Dominick Lepidoptera collection from South Carolina's Santee Delta, collected 1965–1976, and make the data publicly available.
- Digitize modern moth and butterfly collections from the Santee Delta, other under-sampled parts of South Carolina, Sapelo Island and northwest Georgia.
- Make historical photographs, letters and artifacts tied to the specimens publicly accessible alongside the specimen records.
More about the research
The Southeastern Coastal Plain of Georgia and the Carolinas is one of these places: rich in insects but poorly documented. Museum specimens hold this missing information, but only if their data can be searched. This collaborative project, shared with the University of South Carolina and Dalton State College, aims to turn moth and butterfly (Lepidoptera) collections into public digital records.
Why it matters
Public digital records of tens of thousands of historical and modern moth and butterfly specimens could fill a major gap in knowledge of the Southeast's insect fauna. Ecologists, taxonomists and other researchers, as well as the public, would gain access to records of insect diversity in under-documented areas of South Carolina and Georgia.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Timothy Judd
Southeast Missouri State University, MO·Ecology & Evolution
Digitize label data from bee specimens in US insect collections into a shared global database, aiming for at least 350,000 specimen records and 6,600 high-resolution image sets.
Eric Tepe
University of Cincinnati, OH·Plant Science & Agriculture
Relocate the roughly 118,500-specimen Margaret H. Fulford Herbarium into a renovated facility with a compactor system and modern cabinets, replacing storage damaged by repeated water leaks and flooding.
Eric Rickart
University of Utah, UT·Ecology & Evolution
Digitize morphological and reproductive traits, such as body measurements and breeding condition, from about 1.2 million non-marine mammal specimens from western North America across 19 U.S. museums.
The school
College of Charleston: 2 labs on PI Pages, $9M a year on research.
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