Suchergebnisse

Poster presentation presented at the 2017 Texas Academy of Sciences annual meeting in Belton, Texas on March 4, 2017. ; The Fishes of Texas project (www.fishesoftexas.org), originating in 2006, remains the most reliable (quality controlled) and data rich site for acquiring occurrence data for Texas fishes, holding over 124,000 records from 42 institutions. Among many discoveries, the project is responsible for detecting at least 3 freshwater species not previously known from the state. We continue making improvements, but substantial updates so far have been onerous for our developers for various reasons. A recent major update reduces coding redundancies, points the website to a new massively restructured and more fully normalized PostgreSQL database (was MySQL), and places the code in a versioning environment. These changes have little immediate effect on user experience, but will greatly accelerate development. PostgreSQL allows for complex spatial queries which will allow users to quickly map occurrence data alongside many more political/environmental layers than currently possible. While our database/web designers have been implementing these changes and fixing bugs etc., we've been preparing resources for them to integrate into the website. Some highlights to expect: 1 new updates to the state Species of Greatest Concern list; 2 expert opinion-determined nativity spatial layers for all freshwater fishes displaying in our new mapping system; 3 dynamic statistical summaries; 4 new data types from the literature (>14,900 records), citizen science (>4,300), anglers (>37,000), and agency databases (>1,000,000); 5 new museum records, many derived from our gap sampling (~19,000, 4 museums); 6 more specimen examinations (>400) and photographs (1000); 7 document archive with "smart" text search tools (currently in beta testing using TPWD fisheries reports). So be patient and keep your eyes open for updates. ; University of Texas at Austin, Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, U.S. Department of the Interior, ; Integrative Biology

The first part of this presentation focuses on the history, funding, development, methodology, accessibility, discoveries, and products developed as part of the Fishes of Texas Project. The second part is a tutorial on how to use the project website. This presentation was delivered online as a webinar to an audience organized by the Collaborative Conservation and Adaptation Strategy Toolbox, or CCAST. CCAST is organized by the US Fish and Wildlife Service Science Applications Program and the Bureau of Reclamation. It aims to increase communication among the conservation community that improves our ability to tackle natural resources challenges. They do this through the development, distribution, and presentation of Case Studies from across North America. The CCAST Team also supports communities of practice to address critical conservation challenges, including non-native species and response and adaptation to drought. Presentation is also found here via CCAST organizers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9UIVTxZMnw ; Since 2006, the Fishes of Texas Project at University of Texas Austin has sought to improve freshwater fish occurrence data for the state of Texas and make it openly accessible to facilitate research and improve aquatic resource management. Seven federal and state sponsors have contributed funding, but 73% of the total $2.7 million has come from US Fish and Wildlife Service's State Wildlife Grant Program via Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. Initially the Project focused on data digitization and compilation of strictly specimen-vouchered data, followed by georeferencing and development of an interactive website/database (http://www.fishesoftexas.org). More recently, non-vouchered citizen science, angler-based, and agency datasets have been added, thereby increasing both geographic and temporal density of records, and a selected subset of data fields for all records is now published to GBIF and iDigBio. ; University of Texas, Texas Parks and Wildlife, United States Department of the Interior, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality ; Integrative Biology

The presentation focuses on the history, funding, development, methodology, accessibility, discoveries, and products developed as part of the Fishes of Texas Project. This presentation was delivered online as a webinar to an audience organized by the American Institute for Conservation and the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections. Presentation is also found here: https://learning.culturalheritage.org/products/spnhc-spnhc-digitized-specimen-data-use-by-non-academic-and-non-museum-agencies ; Since 2006 the Fishes of Texas (FoTX) Project at University of Texas Austin (UT) has sought to improve freshwater fish occurrence data for the state of Texas and make it openly accessible to facilitate research and improve aquatic resource management. Seven federal and state sponsors have contributed funding, but 73% of the total $2.7 million has come from US Fish and Wildlife Service's State Wildlife Grant Program via Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD). Initially the Project focused on data digitization and compilation of strictly specimen-vouchered data, followed by georeferencing and development of an interactive website/database (http://www.fishesoftexas.org). More recently, non-vouchered citizen science, angler-based, and agency datasets have been added, thereby increasing both geographic and temporal density of records, and a selected subset of data fields for all records is now published to GBIF and iDigBio. The project's comprehensive data aggregation (44 contributing collections), digitization, normalization, accessibility and high data quality (based, in part on extensive taxonomic determination verification via specimen examination), enabled significant advances in detection and awareness of statewide faunal trends that led to implementation of diverse management advances. Examples include improved field guides and documentation of species' ranges, expansions and contractions, community composition shifts, improved species conservation status assessments, and documentation of both long-term expansions of invasive species and new introductions. Relatively new to the Project are statewide aquatic bioassessments - intensive fieldwork planned using tools available in our website that facilitate exploration of geographic and temporal sampling histories and reveal under-sampled areas. Consequently, gaps in knowledge of regional faunas have been steadily decreasing. The website and database are widely used; 90% of presentations on related topics at last year's statewide fisheries meeting utilized FoTX products. This now long-term, consistent funding created a productive partnership between UT and TPWD. With the Project's bioassessments generating specimens, and TPWD's independent routine fish sampling increasingly depositing specimens, our collection (TNHCi - https://www.gbif.org/dataset/6080b6cc-1c24-41ff-ad7f-0ebe7b56f311) has nearly doubled in size over the last decade. Last year, TPWD's list of Species of Greatest Conservation Need was updated, with major changes based on the improved knowledge provided by FoTX. TPWD now funds a full-time Assistant Collection Manager position focusing on bioassessments, but also doing basic collection management and supervision of student and volunteer help. Another grant-funded position, a liaison between the collection and TPWD staff, spawned the ongoing statewide Texas Native Fish Conservation Areas program that coordinates funding and actions of diverse stakeholders for watershed-scale conservation. Both externally funded UT positions participate in diverse collections-based research and outreach endeavors for both UT and TPWD. The FoTX website was developed in large part by staff in UT's science database group in the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) - a collaboration that blossomed into long-term technical support for collection database management and data publication that has since expanded to support all other collections in UT's Biodiversity Center. ; University of Texas, Texas Parks and Wildlife, United States Department of the Interior, Texas Commision on Environmental Quality ; Integrative Biology

The primary aim of this grant was to work with Texas Parks and Wildlife (TPWD), Texas Advanced Computing Center (University of Texas at Austin), and other relevant collaborators to (1) utilize Fishes of Texas Project (FoTX) data to aid in conservation of Texas fishes, (2) conduct field surveys in areas of limited data and of conservation interest, and (3) further develop the FoTX database and website as a research and management tool. While much of our work was focused on Species of Greatest Conservation Need (SGCN), almost everything we did has been applied to all species, or affects the data for all species in some way. Our efforts here demonstrate the value of reliable and verifiable specimen data to conservation and serve as a baseline upon which to build a conservation program. The FoTX data have taken many years to fully develop, largely funded by State Wildlife Grant funds, and that work will continue to evolve, but this report documents how the data have now been used to develop species distribution models and conservation priority areas that are now the foundation of aquatic resource conservation prioritization and management in Texas. Our data were also used by TPWD staff to update the Texas Natural Diversity Database, which was previously depauperate for fish data, and to develop state and global conservation rankings for fishes using NatureServe's standard methodology. Using the FoTX data we also developed recommendations for updating TPWD's SGCN list, which if implemented will inform conservation in Texas for many years. We expanded the scope of FoTX to include a larger geography, into Texas' neighboring states, thus reducing biases caused by our previous political boundary that lacked a biogeographical basis, and to include many new records from new types of complementary data sources, especially agency databases, that together with the museum specimen data provide a more thorough and unbiased dataset for understanding temporal and spatial trends in fish biogeography in Texas. We also developed and integrated tools into the website such as improved checklists and tools for accessing occurrence data held in digitized documents. One of the features most requested by our data users were native ranges for all Texas fish species, which we recently produced and can be viewed in our mapping tab. These native ranges, when viewed alongside occurrence data, allow users to understand trends in shifting distributions over time. We focused another effort explicitly at understanding range changes through time and have produced dynamic graphs, which when fully implemented will update automatically when the underlying data are changed, depicting latitudinal and longitudinal changes over time and general range size changes through time. In addition to this, we were active in the field collecting fishes, focusing on locations where data are lacking or there were other conservation related reasons for collecting. This effort has largely been in coordination with TPWD staff, who have been heavily involved with many of the activities in this project. The collecting effort has resulted in a large number of new specimens and tissue samples deposited and permanently housed in the University of Texas Biodiversity Collections (Texas Natural History Collections) and represents a model for how long term collections and data archiving and management can be achieved. These data are the newest in FoTX and represent the modern data point upon which conservation actions can be effectively implemented. The funding provided for this project has allowed us to continue to grow and diversify, moving away from focusing solely on improving the data themselves, but also on applying those data in diverse ways that maximize their value for conservation. The project has inspired a Herps of Texas Project (HoTX, currently funded by TPWD) and we agreed to allow use of our database schema and website structure as a template to build their project. Getting that project to a similar state as FoTX should be much faster and require far less funding than has been devoted to FoTX. Any improvements to HoTX could also likely be applied to improve FoTX. Our hope is that other projects, focusing on various taxa (e.g. mussels), continue to follow in our footsteps allowing mutual benefit and eventually query interfaces that allow users to access entire ecological communities. ; Texas Parks and Wildlife Department through U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service State Wildlife Grant Program, grant TX T-106-1 (CFDA# 15.634) ; Integrative Biology

presented at the 2017 meeting of the Texas Academy of Science at Mary Hardin Baylor University, Belton, Texas ; Mexican blindcat, Prietella phreatophila, was described in 1954 from a single locality in Northern Coahuila, México. Long listed as endangered by the Mexican federal government, it was listed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as a foreign endangered species in 1970, and the most recent (1996) update of its assessment for the IUCN Red List considers it endangered as well. Explorations in the late 1990s discovered many new localities extending nearly to the international border, and a captive population established provided insights into the species' basic biology and behavior. In 2016 the species was discovered in a cave in the Amistad National Recreation Area (ANRA), just north of the Río Grande in Texas. The 1970 listing instantly gave the TX population full protection under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. The species' subterranean and mostly inaccessible habitat endows it with extremely low detectability and its actual range is likely broader than physical sampling of specimens has revealed. We review all prior and new knowledge of the species and its habitat to provide an updated international reassessment of its overall conservation status and threats, which most notably include aquifer depletion and contamination in both the Mexican and U.S. portions of its known range. A live captive population of two specimens collected in 1997 in Coahuila and one Texas specimen is now at the San Antonio Zoo, we are working with NPS to further explore ANRA caves and hope eventually to return to Coahuila to more fully update the species' conservation status. ; Integrative Biology