Gil Nelson

[excerpted from author's website]
Gil Nelson is a writer, naturalist, educator, and researcher in Tallahassee, Florida. He writes, speaks, edits, and consults on botany, natural history, ecology, outdoor recreation, and environmental science topics, especially as they relate to Florida and the southeastern United States. He holds a Research Faculty position at Florida State University in the Institute for Digital Information and Scientific Communication. He specializes in digitization research and practice and in the use of digital data for biodiversity research for the National Science Foundation's Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio), which serves as the national coordinating center for digitization and data mobilization in the U.S.

He has written for a number of national and regional periodicals including Backpacker Magazine, Blue Ridge Country, Florida Wildlife, Georgia Journal, Louisiana Conservationist, Nature Photographer, and Tennessee Conservationist, and has written several feature articles for The Tallahassee Democrat. Nelson is past editor of Sabal Minor, the bimonthly newsletter of the Florida Native Plant Society.

Nelson is a field botanist and holds a courtesy faculty appointment at the Robert K. Godfrey Herbarium in the Department of Biological Sciences at Florida State University, where he has taught graduate courses in ecosystems of Florida, assisted in the development of the herbarium's online database, and served as project coordinator for the Deep South Plant Specimen Imaging Project, a National Science Foundation funded initiative. He has taught computer programming and relational database design and programming and GIS and is particularly interested in the design and maintenance of botanical/biological database management systems. He maintains PanFlora, an extensive, image-rich database of the vascular flora of the Florida panhandle, greater Florida, and adjacent geographic areas, as well as information about southeastern woody plants.