14 research outputs found
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The Value of Citizen Scientists: Data Collection for American Eel Using Non-Traditional Field Gear & Social Media
American Eel (Anguilla rostrata) is a facultative catadromous species with a unique and complex life history. After hatching, larval eel begin their journey as leptocephalus in the Sargasso Sea and drift on ocean currents along the Atlantic coast, Gulf of Mexico, and Central and South America. They transform into glass eel as they approach shore and begin to develop pigment as they settle in estuaries or move upstream into rivers as elvers. American Eel then spend 3-40+ years in these habitats as yellow eel until they sexually mature into silver eel and return to the Sargasso Sea where they spawn and presumably die. State and federal agencies, multiple universities and numerous citizen science volunteers are working to better understand their movement patterns and recruitment window in Texas. Citizen scientists with coastal chapters of the Texas Master Naturalists (TMN) have taken a lead role in assisting with this effort. Since February of 2018, TMN have established a network of monitoring sites across the mid to upper Texas Coast to sample for juvenile American Eel using eel mops. Eel mops have been deployed for various lengths of time at 29 sites throughout the past two years and checked routinely for glass and elver eel. Volunteers have conducted approximately 250 eel mop checks and provided record of their catch by category (e.g., eel, shrimp, crab, other fish, etc.) based on occurrence or abundance. TMN have documented close to 7,000 individuals across all categories with various species of crab, shrimp, and fish being the most common groups collected. While no glass or elver eel have been collected in an eel mop, TMN have provide valuable data for this project by testing a common gear type that is often used to monitor for American Eel on the Atlantic Coast.Integrative Biolog
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Fishes of Texas Project: Data Visualization and Analysis Tools
Poster presentation presented at the 2020 Texas Chapter of the American Fisheries Society annual meeting in Waco, Texas on January 24, 2020.The Fishes of Texas Project (FoTX) (http://fishesoftexas.org) database currently has 124,452 specimen-vouchered occurrence records spanning > 150 years with over 400,000 new records (including non-vouchered sources such as literature, anecdotal, and photo-based) in the process of being imported. Continual data growth prompted creation of new tools to dynamically assess (as the data evolve) the state of data coverage across various dimensions to increase user understanding and accessibility to the data and improve overall utility of the project. We produced species sampling curves, temporal species accumulation graphs, and heat maps of collecting event density over time and space for each river sub-basin within Texas. A QGIS plugin was also created to better assess the suspect status of incoming records. Each type of visualization has basic documentation, easily accessible statistical summaries, flexible queries, and exploration tools to help reveal variations in sampling density over both temporal and spatial dimensions. We highlight here the San Bernard River as an example of a notably under-sampled sub-basin (as indicated by diverse forms of evidence). With addition of future records, these dynamic tools will continue to illustrate taxonomic and spatial sampling deficiencies that in turn will help guide conservation planning.Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, under the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service State Wildlife Grant Program, grant TX T-180-R-1, F17AF01129 (CFDA# 15.634)Integrative Biolog
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Year 1 report for âConserving Texas Biodiversity: Status, Trends, and Conservation Planning for Fishes of Greatest Conservation Needâ
State Wildlife Grant Program, grant TX T-106-1 (CFDA# 15.634), Contract No. 459125 UTA14-001402Substantive progress was made on all major Project Activities in this first year:
Activity 1. Coordinate and Facilitate Science and Conservation Actions for Conserving Texas Biodiversity - We expanded and strengthened UT-TPWD coordination, transitioning the relationship between these partners into a much more collaborative one than was previously realized. The flow of data between TPWD and the Fishes of Texas Project (supported in part by this project) has become much more bi-directional. Many newly collected TPWD specimens, agency databases, legacy data products and reports, and feedback from resource managers are now beginning to contribute substantively to growth and diversity (now including non-specimen-vouchered records) of data served through the FoTX Projectâs websites. Work on cleaning and normalizing of FoTXâs online specimen-vouchered database continued, and the updated FoTX occurrence and distribution data are being actively used. Most recently they were used by this project, together with expert (TPWD, UT and othersâ) opinions, to develop recommendations on conservation status of native fishes of Texasâ Species of Greatest Conservation Need for TPWDâs consideration in anticipated updates to the Texas Conservation Action Plan. Within two months of this report, a new and substantially larger and improved version of the FoTX website/database and related collection of images, field notes, and ancillary datasets, will be formally announced.
Activity 2. Identify Priority Geographic Management Units for Conserving Fishes of Greatest Conservation Need - We used FoTX data in a systematic conservation area prioritization analysis to identify Native Fish Conservation Areas (NFCAs) for large portions of Texas where such comprehensive planning had not been previously carried out. Updated and new FoTX data for all Texas fish Species of Greatest Conservation Need (SGCN) were used in production of newly improved Species Distribution Models for input into this planning process, and the results of the planning exercise have already been integrated by TPWD into management prioritizations of both those species and the resultant NFCAs.
Activity 3. Develop Monitoring and Conservation Plans for Native Fish Conservation Areas - Monitoring and conservation plans were delivered to TPWD for all NFCAs identified in Activity 2.
Activity 4. Conduct Field-Based Surveys Detailed Biodiversity Assessments (i.e. Bioblitzing), and Citizen-Based Monitoring - Field surveys with detailed biodiversity assessments (âbioblitzesâ) and citizen-based monitoring were conducted in three areas selected collaboratively by TPWD and FoTX Project staff from within the identified NFCAs: Nueces River headwaters, Big Cypress Bayou basin, and Village Creek basin. Along with this field effort, FoTX Project staff developed and circulated guidelines and best practices, and provided training for citizen-based monitoring that leverages iNaturalist for capture and reporting of photo-vouchered occurrence records in ways that will help assure scientifically useful data are obtained. All specimens acquired during these field efforts, and from many other routine specimen acquisitions from across the state (1845 total records/jars of specimens), were cataloged in the UT Fish Collection database. From there, these new records will soon be fed into GBIF, VertNet, FishNet2 and other major online data aggregators, including the online Fishes of Texas database.Texas Parks and Wildlife Department; U.S. Fish and Wildlife ServiceIntegrative Biolog
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Preliminary Results of American Eel Sampling Efforts in Gulf of Mexico Drainages of Texas
American Eel Anguilla rostrata has a unique and complex life history that is fairly well-studied on the eastern coast of the United States, but few studies have been done on Gulf of Mexico drainages. To inform conservation and management decisions, efforts to better understand the population structure, seasonal dynamics, and life history of American Eel are underway. The primary objectives of our efforts are to assess the current and historical distribution and abundance, habitat use, movement patterns, parasite occurrence, diet and population structure of American Eel across all life stages in Gulf of Mexico drainages of Texas.Texas State Wildlife Grant Program grants T-173-R-1 and T-172-R-1 in cooperation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Wildlife and Sport Fish Restoration ProgramIntegrative Biolog
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Update on the Fishes of Texas Project
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.,
weâve 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 âsmartâ 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 Biolog
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American Eel in Texas â what we do, donât, and need to, know
Copy of the oral presentation made by the first author to the January 2016 meeting of the Texas Chapter of American Fisheries Society in Kerrville, Texas. Presentation is provided in several file formats. Data mapped in the presentation are also included in kml format (Google Earth).American Eel is undoubtedly one of the most studied freshwater fishes of North America. Many recent discoveries have added new insights that re-write important aspects of the âtext bookâ knowledge of the speciesâ complex life history in ways that could have significant impacts on management. Despite all of this new information, debate about the speciesâ conservation status continues, and new threats, such as continued habitat loss and major clandestine fisheries driven by extremely high value in the global market, have further complicated management. Though USFWS recently decided that the species does not merit listing as âEndangered,â in 2012 Canada changed that countryâs assessment of the speciesâ status from âSpecial Concernâ (since 2006) to âThreatenedâ and IUCN upped its classification in 2013 to âEndangered.â Ontario has considered it âEndangeredâ since 2007. All U.S. Atlantic states vowed to work together to produce, in 1999, the American Eel Benchmark Stock Assessment, which mandated each state conduct standardized monitoring of recruitment and later, mandatory catch and effort monitoring. Given all that activity and data generation, it is remarkable that still so little is known about the populations of the Gulf of Mexico (GOM) and its tributary rivers that making any management decisions in that large, neglected part of the speciesâ range is virtually impossible. The Fishes of Texas Project team has been collating and improving the limited and scattered data on occurrences of the species in the region and concludes it important to promote a broad scale (Gulf of Mexico) collaborative community effort to acquire and share data and carefully curated specimens and, hopefully, develop a GOM-wide collaborative research and management plan like that implemented by Atlantic states. Here weâll review the literature and state of knowledge about the species in Texas and GOM, and suggest ways to begin work toward such an effort.University of Texas at AustinIntegrative Biolog
Interview with Cristina Casarez, April 16, 2009
These oral histories were conducted in the Spring 2009 semester of the Mexican American Culture (BBL 3023) course taught by Dr. Marie Miranda. The course is a survey of Mexican American cultural distinctiveness in the areas of biculturalism, cultural production, and social organization. This offering of the course examined Chicana/o popular culture focusing on rock ânâ roll
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An Alternative Shelving Arrangement for Natural History Collection Objects to Optimize Space and Task Efficiency
A taxonomic and alphabetic arrangement (TAA) of objects on shelves has prevailed in fluid-preserved natural history collections while they were managed by scientists for their own research. Now most collections are databased and internet-accessible to facilitate very different forms of research accomplished remotely by researchers who require less physical access to specimens. The collections staff who make those data available struggle to manage collection growth with limited space and budgets, while demands on them are increasing, necessitating task and space-efficient collection management solutions. We describe an alternative arrangement of objects based on their size and catalog number (OCA) that capitalizes on modern databases. Our partial implementation of this system facilitated pragmatic between-system comparisons of space use and staff time required for routine tasks. Our OCA allows 17% more jars to be stored in a given space than a TAA (not counting spaces left for growth), but adjusting vertical spacing of shelves could increase that to 115%. Ten of 15 staff tasks were more efficiently accomplished in the OCA section of the collection, and we propose ways to improve efficiency for three of the four tasks for which the TAA outperformed the OCA.Integrative Biolog
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Final Report: Data provision and projected impact of climate change on fish biodiversity within the Desert LCC
The four primary objectives of this project were to: (1) compile a dataset of fish occurrence records for the entirety of the Rio Grande drainage in the US and Mexico; (2) improve that dataset by reformatting dates, synonymizing species names to a modern taxonomy, georeferencing localities, and flagging geographic outliers; (3) for those species with sufficient data for modeling, create species distribution models (SDMs); (4) use the environmental conditions determined via those models to project the species distributions into the future under two climate scenarios. To accomplish those objectives, we compiled 495,101 fish occurrence records mined from 122 original sources into a single database. We then, on the basis of text string searches of the original sources' verbatim locality fields, extracted 145,426 records that we judged to have a reasonable likelihood of being from the Rio Grande drainage. For those records we edited taxonomy, reformatted dates, and finally georeferenced 59,156 (41%) records, which proved sufficient for constructing SDMs for 36 species that met a priori quality assurance criteria. We provide basic interpretation of these models and discuss projections of them into several different future climate forecasts. Products include raw model outputs and symbolized maps helpful in interpretation and comparison, as well as raw data sets and recommendations regarding how all of these product might be used in future management and research efforts.United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation, Desert Landscape Conservation CooperativeTexas Natural Science Cente
Testing An Alternative Shelving Arrangement to Optimize Space and Task Efficiency in a Fluid Fish Collection
Presentation made by Dean A. Hendrickson to the June 5-10 2022 meeting of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections in Edinburgh, Scotland, UKFor centuries, a taxonomic and alphabetic arrangement (TAA) of objects on shelves prevailed in fluid-preserved natural history collections while they were managed mostly by scientists for their own or vistorsâ on-site research using physical specimens. However, most modern collections are now databased and internet-accessible, facilitating diverse forms of research accomplished remotely and decreasing the frequency of need for physical access to specimens, yet the way specimens are shelved and accessed remains nearly universally unchanged. With our fish collection struggling with both severe space limitation and unprecedented rapid growth supporting externally funded research that requires rapid specimen processing and data publication, we started shelving in an object (jar) and catalog number-based arrangement (OCA). To make that possible in our limited and near-full space, without altering our physical shelves in any way, we eliminated all between-jar spaces in our collection, including the customary space between taxa, while keeping it in its original TAA-based order (thus eliminating TAA-based growth capacity. In the resultant empty shelf space, we implemented an OCA shelving system for all newly cataloged jars. Once the OCA contained a relatively large number of jars, we carried out pragmatic, TAA-OCA comparisons. Volumetric jar storage capacity in the OCA is 17% > TAA, and adjusting the OCAâs vertical shelf spacing to optimize for each of our 3 jar sizes (impossible in the TAA), could increase that to 115% > TAA. Ten of 15 routine staff tasks were more efficiently accomplished in the OCA than in the TAA, and the OCA greatly decreases shelving errors (misplacement). We discuss ways to improve efficiency in the OCA for the 5 tasks on which the TAA out-performed it, and report ancillary, unanticipated benefits, such as a way to much more efficiently and quickly monitor fluid levels across all jars. All newly cataloged specimen jars continue going into our OCA, and we have significantly postponed hitting the point of absolutely being unable to continue growing. We are hopeful that eventually, a move to a new space will enable conversion of the entire collection from TAA to a more fully-optimized OCA.Integrative Biolog