Dashboards

Data summaries are provided under our Stats and Conservation tab, usually as dashboards created with Tableau software by Colton Avila, and later improved by Casey Hartsough. These dashboards are dynamically linked to the Fishes of Texas database and facilitate a deeper understanding of our data. They can be tweaked using filters and copied into reports and presentations, but please cite us properly. They are meant to be mostly self-explanatory, but some details on each follows:

Data summary dashboards are histograms summarizing numbers of sampling events (i.e sampling effort), biodiversity, and data quality efforts across many parameters. Some of these allow user filtering.

Data gap tools were designed to assist in detecting spatial and temporal gaps in our fish data. These include:

(1) A map indicating relative sampling completeness for areas (HUC8s) across the state. Sampling completeness is calculated from a species accumulation curve for each area, which incorporates the logic - as samples accumulate in an area with a fixed number of species, fewer and fewer new species should be encountered. An area where no new species are collected, despite lots of sampling, is considered well sampled, while an area where new species are continually encountered is considered poorly sampled. The curves can be used to predict the number of species in an area, which can then be compared to the number of species that have actually been collected. The ratio of these (number of species collected / number of species predicted) is the statistic we used for evaluating sampling completeness. This dashboard only includes data which is specimen vouchered, non-suspect, non-captive, and having spatial error under 50km. Hybrid species data have been excluded from this map. 

(2) Graphs showing the temporal accumulation of species and sampling effort. These allow users to explore the accumulation of species over time compared to sampling effort for any HUC8 or major basin. The raw data can be further explored in the species list below the graph by clicking on the data icon that appears after clicking on any data item. This dashboard only includes specimen vouchered data, non-suspect data, non-captive and with spatial error under 50km. 

(3) Gap Heat Maps display sampling data geographically to better illustrate sampling density by region. User filtering is allowed on river basin, HUC8s, sampling density, date, spatial error, and data type. Additionally, users can choose whether or not to include suspect data and captive data. Raw data can be explored by selecting regions of interest and clicking on the data icon which appears by clicking on a cell. These maps exclude data with a spatial error greater than 50km, as well as all hybrid species data.

Trend analyses were developed (provisionally and using only Tracks 1 & 2 data) for each species using methodology similar to Buckwalter et al (2018). These authors provided a quantitative method for detection of trends of expansion or contraction of range-size for fish based on collections data much like that held in FoTX. For more details on these methods see Cohen et. al. (2018).

A poster presentation is currently available that explains more about these Tableau dashboards.

References:

Buckwalter, J. D., E. A. Frimpong, P. L. Angermeier, and J. N. Barney. 2018. Seventy years of stream-fish collections reveal invasions and native range contractions in an Appalachian (USA) watershed. Diversity and Distributions 24(2):219–232.

Cohen, A. E., G. P. Garrett, M. J. Casarez, D. A. Hendrickson, B. J. Labay, T. Urban, J. Gentle, D. Wiley, and D. Walling. 2018. Final Report: Conserving Texas Biodiversity: Status, Trends, and Conservation Planning for Fishes of Greatest Conservation Need. Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, United States Fish and Wildlife Service State Wildlife Grant Program.