Description
The Fishes of Texas Project aims to provide reliable occurrences of fishes from the entire extents of all the drainage basins that intersect Texas. Starting in 2006, with the database of specimens held in the University of Texas' Ichthyology Collection (TNHCi), we added specimen data collected from our study area from all of the museums we could find to create the initial version of the Fishes of Texas database. At the time, many of those were not online and all had their data in diverse formats and development of biodiversity data standards was in its infancy. We laboriously compiled these disparate sources into a schema derived from that of the Specify Collections Management software. We retain the verbatim data received from the data donors, but then did our own processing and quality control starting by normalizing formats and taxonomy. We manually georeferenced all localities, allowing us to map species to find outliers and, as possible, examined specimens and corrected determinations for misidentified specimens. We photographed specimens and original labels of many specimens examined. Uncertainty in dates is expressed using begin and end dates. Uncertainty in locations is expressed with a radius, that with coordinates (lat., long.), defines a circle in which the collection is determined to have occurred. The institutions holding examined specimens have been informed of our re-determinations and other corrections, but we do not control repatriation, so users may find our records for some specimens conflict with the data they might now independently publish. The database continues to grow and evolve, initially holding only specimen records from 44 institutions, now includes data from 116 institutions including non-specimen sources such as state and federal agencies, citizen scientists, peer and non-peer reviewed literature and word of mouth accounts. Thus, the dataset contains many records that are not openly published, for use by researchers and resource managers interested in the fish fauna of Texas and adjoining parts of its river basins. The same data can also be queried and explored in diverse ways via our website (http://www.fishesoftexas.org), where users will find additional documentation and other data-exploration tools. Please use our contact information there to notify us of any errors or other issues.
Data Records
The data in this occurrence resource has been published as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A), which is a standardized format for sharing biodiversity data as a set of one or more data tables. The core data table contains 895,591 records.
This IPT archives the data and thus serves as the data repository. The data and resource metadata are available for download in the downloads section. The versions table lists other versions of the resource that have been made publicly available and allows tracking changes made to the resource over time.
Versions
The table below shows only published versions of the resource that are publicly accessible.
How to cite
Researchers should cite this work as follows:
Hendrickson D A, Cohen A E (2025). Fishes of Texas Project (FoTX) Database - Darwin Core. Version 1.14. University of Texas at Austin, Biodiversity Collections. Occurrence dataset. doi:10.17603/C3WC70
Rights
Researchers should respect the following rights statement:
The publisher and rights holder of this work is University of Texas at Austin, Biodiversity Collections. To the extent possible under law, the publisher has waived all rights to these data and has dedicated them to the Public Domain (CC0 1.0). Users may copy, modify, distribute and use the work, including for commercial purposes, without restriction.
GBIF Registration
This resource has been registered with GBIF, and assigned the following GBIF UUID: ba5b0f3a-73dd-459f-a7f1-9abc327aed00. University of Texas at Austin, Biodiversity Collections publishes this resource, and is itself registered in GBIF as a data publisher endorsed by GBIF-US.
Keywords
Occurrence; Observation; Occurrence
Contacts
- Metadata Provider ●
- Originator ●
- Point Of Contact
- Ichthyology Curator
- 10100 Burnet RD, PRC 176/R4000
- +01 512-471-9774
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7835-0295
- Metadata Provider ●
- Originator ●
- Point Of Contact
- Ichthyology Collections Manager
- 10100 Burnet RD, PRC 176/R4000
- +01 512-471-8845
- Point Of Contact
- Senior Software Developer
- Processor
- Ichthyology Collections Assistant Manager
- 10100 Burnet RD, PRC 176/R4000
- +01 512-475-8171
- Programmer
- Programmer
Geographic Coverage
Our study area includes Texas and shared drainage basins going into neighbor states, Colorado, and the Gulf of Mexico (north of a line drawn from the southeastern edge of Louisiana to the southeastern edge of Tamaulipas). Data were obtained by database searches or personal requests for data from that area. In many cases provider databases lacked the data fields to allow discovery of those records, in which case we requested data from larger geographic areas (e.g. country). All records that were acquired are provided in the database, but only those in our study area have received the full processing efforts (georeferencing, suspect flagging, specimen examination, date corrections etc).
| Bounding Coordinates | South West [24.447, -109.16], North East [40.914, -88.682] |
|---|
Taxonomic Coverage
All fish taxa
| Class | Actinopterygii, Agnatha, Chondrichthyes, Osteichthyes |
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Temporal Coverage
| Living Time Period | Mid-1800s to recent |
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Project Data
This is the database of the Fishes of Texas Project (www.fishesoftexas.org). The project aims to bring together in one database all of the specimen data pertaining to fishes of Texas. Initial efforts focused on specimen data, which we believe should be the foundation of our knowledge about Texas fish biogeography, but recognizing the value of other types of data, later efforts include the addition of non-specimen data.
| Title | Fishes of Texas (FoTX) Project |
|---|---|
| Identifier | FoTX |
| Funding | Funding has been provided primarily by Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, University of Texas, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, and the US Department of the Interior. See http://www.fishesoftexas.org/documentation/sponsors/ |
| Study Area Description | Texas and its shared drainages in neighbor states and the Gulf of Mexico north of a line drawn from the eastern edge of Louisiana to the southern edge of Tamaulipas. |
| Design Description | Specimens are collected by various and often undocumented means. Information about sampling gear, methods and habitats is recorded in our database when available. |
The personnel involved in the project:
Sampling Methods
The Fishes of Texas Project is a data acquisition and improvement project and thus includes data collected by others using various means. More recent funding has allowed the Fishes of Texas Project team to collect specimens from data gaps detected in the database using various collection methods. See our documentation to learn more: http://www.fishesoftexas.org/documentation/
| Study Extent | Our study area includes Texas and shared drainage basins going into neighbor states, Colorado, and the Gulf of Mexico (north of a line drawn from the eastern edge of Louisiana to the southern edge of Tamaulipas). Data were obtained based on database searches or personal requests for data from that area. In many cases provider data lacked the data fields to allow discovery of those records, in which case we requested data from larger geographic areas (eg. country). All records that were acquired are provided in the database, but only those in our study area have received the full processing efforts (georeferencing, suspect flagging, specimen examination, date corrections etc). |
|---|---|
| Quality Control | Records from many disparate sources have been brought into a common format and standardized (taxa names, dates, and collector names in particular) allowing them to be queried in a single database. Localities have been georeferenced (including error estimate) if possible. These steps allowed us to map the records of each species and detect spatial and temporal outliers, which we flagged as "suspect". Early versions of the database were strictly specimen based and we've made extensive efforts to find specimens that we flagged and examine them to correct determination errors. See our documentation to learn more: http://www.fishesoftexas.org/documentation/ |
Method step description:
- After data were acquired, either directly from source or via online data aggregator, they were (1) re-formatted; (2) georeferenced to coordinates with an error radius estimate (those then determined to be in our study area received the most complete data standardization); (3) standardized (when possible) taxa to AFS Common and Scientific Names of Fishes or the GBIF backbone; (4) standardized collector names when possible; (5) standardized dates to begin and end dates; (6) flagged records that we thought had erroneous data as "suspect" records; (7) examined "suspect" specimens, which usually turn out to be mis-identifications. See our documentation to learn more: http://www.fishesoftexas.org/documentation/
Additional Metadata
| Purpose | This project addresses a long-needed effort to bring together in one database the world-wide museum holdings on the fishes of Texas (later non-specimen data as well). Before this project, museum data 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 digital record of their collections and had paper ledgers only. Many are small museums that do not offer their data online. Some have no catalog at all, except what is recorded on jar labels. Extensive efforts were made to find, compile, format, and standardize data from these museums into one database. |
|---|---|
| Maintenance Description | Data are refreshed monthly, but actual updates to those data are expected less-frequently. |
| Alternative Identifiers | ba5b0f3a-73dd-459f-a7f1-9abc327aed00 |
| https://ipt.tacc.utexas.edu/resource?r=fotx |