Good for Google

I have a Google Alert on my beloved homeland, "Harding County" to be exact, of South Dakota. It astounds me at what I learn from them. Today it picked up a news article from the Black Hills Pioneer newspaper.

"According to Mark Gabel, BHSU emeritus professor and curator of the Herbarium, the primary goal of the Herbarium staff is to document the little known flora of western South Dakota and the Black Hills including the Bear Lodge Mountains of Wyoming. An example is the ongoing study of the flora of Harding County that is an example of combining field studies with collection based research. The Herbarium is a vital resource for conservation research.
"The flora of the Black Hills (including the Bear Lodge Mountains of eastern Wyoming) is unique, with elements of the eastern deciduous forest, the Great Plains, the boreal forest, the Rocky Mountains and southwestern United States. Species of plants previously unknown in the region are being discovered from the Black Hills every year," Gabel says.
The Herbarium obtained a major grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to create a database all of the plants from West River South Dakota and eastern Wyoming. The grant will provide a Web-accessible database with all label data from over 100,000 specimens by 2009.

For this past prairie walker, who loved the plants I pondered as a child, this was indeed good news. Now I will be able to explore the prairie floor once more.