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The database contains ALL records that we received from our donors upon our request for Texas records. Donors often gave more than requested to be absolutely sure that we received all of their Texas records including those on the opposite banks of border rivers. Thus, we have many records from the Gulf of Mexico and Texas' US and Mexican border states. We provide these records that are beyond our geographic scope since some will in fact contain locality errors and actually be from Texas (we hope users will help us correct those) and many are located in basins shared with Texas and thus of ecological significance in relation to Texas fishes. Thus, many users will be interested in such records despite the fact that they have not been georeferenced or processed to the extent in-state records have. Since these records have not been georeferenced, they are not available via queries on geographic fields. Users interested in these will achieve best results by querying on verbatim data fields.
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Some data are not yet in our database. Before data become visible in our online database several steps must occur. Specimens must be cataloged at the donor institution. This typically requires proper identification of the specimens and entry into their database. For many institutions this can take some time (depending on funding and staff time) and some have backlogs of uncataloged specimens from as long ago as the 1950's. Our own collection (Texas Natural History Collections) recently completed cataloging of our backlog and all of those data are included or soon will be included in the Fishes of Texas Project database. After cataloging we must receive the data from our donors, which is typically only upon our request. We have no control over cataloging operations at other institutions; however, our intent (at TNHC) is to reduce the time from specimen donation to appearance in the database significantly so that users can quickly see their data online. This will improve donation rates and data quality since users can verify how their data were entered into our database and contact us if they find errors. Furthermore, users may be inclined to supplement their data by uploading scanned field notes or photographs related to the collection.
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We are also looking for enthusiastic volunteers to assist with numerous tasks related to this ongoing project. If you are interested in volunteering and can do so on a regular weekly schedule, please contact us.
Why can't I download data? Do I need to register?
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Why are there two or more records of what I (and I think most people) would call a single museum lot?
Typically, our records represent specimen(s) of a single species collected during a single collecting event (date and place) and database records represent a jar on a museum's shelf. See Instances of Record Duplication for exceptions.
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We are aware that many conflicts exist. Our species accounts are independently authored and come from the TexasFreshwater Texas Freshwater Fishes Website based mostly on published literature. We are working to address conflicts between the two.
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The most likely reason for this is that those records have coordinates that we placed on a neighboring county, probably with an error radius that overlaps your queried county. Those records likely are on a stream that is the border between two counties and are assigned to a county neighboring the one you are interested in. Users should query neighboring counties as well as their county of interest and also check the verbatim data if records can still not be found. Future improvements to our website will allow 'smart' queries that pull all records with error radii overlapping geographic search criteria. See Georeferencing and Geographic Units and Geographic Methods for more details regarding our georeferencing.
Some data
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seem to have changed since last time I looked. How could this happen?
This may happen time to time, although we will never change the donor's verbatim data unless they do and pass it on to us. Our data editing process is ongoing and will probably never truly end. We continue to examine specimens that we are suspicious of, usually geographic outliers. And we have recently begun an intensive verification project at the Texas Natural History Collection looking at species pairs which are often confused. Many other errors are brought to our attention from our users. We will make edits to our data in batches, creating new versions of the database each time, which can be tracked in our Version Tracking section. Users should also look at our What's New Section to learn about other events relevant to our project.
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