Blogs

September 25, 2015

This workshop, fourth in an iDigBio-hosted series on biodiversity informatics, aimed to equip natural history collections personnel with the proper tools to make their data ‘research ready’.  It was held at Arizona State University, Sept. 15-17 and covered such topics as:  Data Management Planning, Digitization Workflows, Intro to Data Mapping, Images and Media Issues, and Data Cleaning.  A detailed agenda can be viewed at their Workshop Wiki.

March 11, 2016

This past weekend, members of our team attended the 119^th Annual Texas Academy of Science Meeting in Junction, where our own Dr. Gary Garrett was selected for the Distinguished Texas Scientist Award. Recipients are chosen by the Academy’s Board of Directors for work that demonstrates “distinguished contributions to science through research and publication that has garnered recognition at the national and international level.” Gary began his career at the University of Texas, earning his Ph.D under Dr. Clark Hubbs, studying reproductive strategies of the endangered Pecos Pupfish.  From there he continued his research, centered on the conservation of natural resources in the state, as a Conservation Biologist for the Research Division at Texas Parks and Wildlife’s Heart of the Hills Fisheries Science Center for over 25 years. He then served as Director for the Department’s Watershed Conservation Program, before returning to UT as part of our Fishes of Texas team in 2014. Gary’s numerous accomplishments include over 85 publications and he has served as:  President of the Texas Organization for Endangered Species, Chairman of the Desert Fishes Council, President of the Texas Chapter of American Fisheries, Editor of the Proceedings of the Desert Fishes Council, Editor of the Proceedings of the Texas Chapter of the American Fisheries Society, and Associate Editor for the Southwestern Association of Naturalists. He is a member of various conservation organizations such as, USFWS Rio Grande Silvery Minnow Recovery Team, Southern Edwards Aquifer Species Recovery Team, Team Leader of the Rio Grande Fishes Recovery Team, as well as, a Fellow of the Texas Academy of Science, a Research Fellow at The University of Texas, Visiting Professor at Texas A&M University, Adjunct Professor at Texas State University and on the Board of Scientists of the Chihuahuan Desert Research Institute. All of that experience with TPWD and the state’s fishes and conservation of them and their habitats, made Gary an invaluable addition to our Fishes of Texas Project team. He’s been a huge asset in helping assure coordination between our research and applied science with the diverse programs at TPWD (the project’s primary sponsor), translating the science we do to on-the-ground natural resource management. Our Native Fish Conservation Areas project, for example, originated with use of our database in Species Distribution Models. We then fed that into systematic Conservation Planning analyses and the resulting recommendations now are the basis for meetings organized by TPWD with regional stakeholders in TX and northward into the Great Plains to coordinate all of their programs across agency and other political boundaries via a series of watershed-based conservation workshops.

More on his latest accomplishments can be found here:

Biologist Gary Garrett Named Distinguished Texas Scientist by Texas Academy of Science

Photo courtesy of: Lynn McCutchen

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October 5, 2016

We recently attended the Barton Springs University event at Zilker Park, hosted by the Save Our Springs alliance.  Dean Hendrickson presented a talk about Eels – “The Whole Truth About the Weirdest Fish in Town”.  We also hosted a table with information on the fish diversity found within Barton Creek (flyer with fishes from the creek below) and how anyone can contribute to providing biodiversity observations for the area (see iNaturalist flyer below).

More on this event can be found here:

Barton Spring University Graduates its Second Class

Barton Springs University

Save Our Springs

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See also: Conservation, biodiversity, citizen-science

February 19, 2018

Last week a City of Port Lavaca employee contacted us after finding information about our eel project online. He had found a bunch of eels in an effluent box in the discharge channel of the city’s Wastewater Treatment plant. Our project collaborator Stephen Curtis, from TPWD’s River Studies Program, picked them up and got them to us, and the event was featured in local newspapers as well as on social media, which then sparked several other reports of eels.

We quickly processed the 16 specimens and find this collection particularly fascinating not only because of the situation in which these eels were found (maybe there’s more of these ready-made eel traps out there just waiting to be sampled), but it also contains a wide range of sizes (177-812mm/~7-32 inches, in length) and is another indicator that our outreach efforts (by TPWD and FoTX) are working. Our eel project just got funded 3 months ago, and we’ve quickly gone from being pessimistic to quite optimistic about our ability to reach the goal of 100 specimens from across the state for genetic and otolith microchemistry analyses.