History

University of Texas at Austin professor Dr. Clark Hubbs worked, starting at least as early as the 1970's, toward the vision of producing a book on the Fishes of Texas. He relied for content primarily on his field notes and personal knowledge of the state's fish fauna that stemmed from his extensive statewide fish collecting activities for his diverse research projects. Those projects began in 1949 when he first came to UT and the preserved specimen collection produced later became the fish collection of UT's Texas Natural Science Center's (Formerly Texas Memorial Museum) Texas Natural History Collection (TNHCi). Much more information on Dr. Hubbs is available from the Hubbs Ichthyological Society pages that we created and maintain.

In the last decades of Dr. Hubbs' life, he was joined in this book project by his former graduate students, Dr. Gary Garrett of Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD) and Dr. Robert Edwards, professor at University of Texas Pan-American (UTPA).

In the late-1990's Dr. Dean Hendrickson, Curator of the Fish Collection at the TNHCi, formally joined the effort and began to focus on compiling and standardizing all museum specimen-based collections data on the state's fish fauna. From the start, the vision for this database was to provide data for the book as well as to serve it via the Worldwide Web in a way that would complement the hardcopy book. Such a hardbound book may eventually be produced, but since 2006, Hendrickson and his colleagues and assistants have focused on the database and a web interface for it.

Funding from TPWD and Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) allowed the project to begin to grow to involve more paid and volunteer workers. Mr. Adam Cohen (TNHCi Collection Manager) started in 2006 as primary database manager and has been working o the project since. Later, Ben Labay, F. Doug Martin, Melissa Casarez, Jeremy Harrison, Blake Sissel, Chase Shelburne, and Ryan Rash have all contributed greatly to the project. Dr. Gary Garrett, formerly at Texas Parks and Wildlife, joined the team in 2015. In addition, a long list of volunteers and students have been involved in various aspects of the project from its inception.

In 2009 Dr. Timothy Bonner of Texas State University at San Marcos joined the collaboration by making his group's independently authored species accounts available for inclusion in our web offerings. More recently Tomislav Urban, David Walling and John Gentle at the University of Texas' Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) have worked in various aspects of the project, serving our data to the web, offering cutting edge digital data management, and providing supercomputer processing power for our research that utilizes the now relatively mature database.

This online database is thus the product of a growing, multi-institutional, and multi-year collaborative effort to consolidate, standardize and fully georeference all of, the known scientific information on the freshwater fishes of Texas. All of the collaborators' institutions have provided support by at least allowing the collaborators to dedicate their time to this endeavor, but in some cases, they have contributed much more by sponsoring specific sub-projects.