Need

Modern research and conservation efforts require high quality, verifiable data, to deduce a baseline historic community at various spatial scales and ideally lots of it, for trend detection, modeling and other sorts of complex analyses. There is thus a critical need to bring historic occurrence data together, normalize them, georeference them (so they can be mapped), detect/correct errors, and provide them to the world. Before this project (<2006), museum data for Texas' fish were only available from many disparate and often hard to find sources, located in several countries and managed in various incompatible databases. Some of these museums lacked a digital record of their collections, having paper ledgers only. Many are small museums that did not offer their data online (although this is now changing quickly). Some had no catalog at all, except what is recorded on jar labels. Many rarely updated their databases as taxonomy changed or examined specimens as new information was learned. Spelling mistakes and other typographical errors were common among all data fields in most museums. These problems made queries difficult to impossible.

Thus the highest quality, and oldest data (those based on specimens) about where and when fish occur in Texas were largely inaccessible and not often very useful when they were. Anyone who did access them (what they could find) for a specific research problem, perhaps for a specific species, had to clean them up themselves - a process that has been done many times over the years with various levels of completeness. Those efforts have been sporadic and not usually done in ways that correct data at the source so that future data users might benefit. At the beginning of this project, to our knowledge, no one had tried to bring the data together into a single normalized database where all of the data could be queried together the way the Fishes of Texas project has now done.