Geographic Scope

The geographic extent of the project originally (Versions 1.0 and 2.0) was defined as the political area of Texas including the barrier islands and bays. Our data acquisition, georeferencing, and normalizations efforts then focused entirely on records within the political boundary of Texas and those records outside the political boundary or Texas were only retrievable via queries of verbatim (unedited) donor fields. However, since fish are unaware of political boundaries and a complete understanding of Texas ecosystems requires inclusion of those parts of Texas basins within other jurisdictions, we aimed to add those records.  Although the database always did include some of these records, we've now, with Version 3.0, added marine and freshwater records from the Gulf of Mexico, inland Mexico, and neighboring US states (Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana). In Version 3 we make most of the pre-existing records that were outside of Texas but in shared basins, more easily available (see georeferencing) and add our Track 3 dataset, which includes many more records from Texas' neighbors. 

The map below shows the area for which we requested records, which includes Texas and neighboring US and Mexican states. 

The map below shows the project study area with HUC8s overlaid. HUCs that intersect with the state of Texas are colored, but all HUCs depicted constitute the study area since they are hydrologically connected.

Taxonomic Scope

We limit the taxonomic scope of the project to fishes as defined by those taxa accepted by the American Fisheries Society (Nelson, 2004) and as described here. See our Taxonomy page for a complete and current list of taxa included in the project.

Temporal Scope

We requested records from institutional donors regardless of date and include all records received including those without a date recorded. We do not maintain data on time of day of collection, but in some rare instances such data may be found in verbatim donor data.