The primary mission of the Fishes of Texas Project is to compile and make available to researchers, resource managers and other interested individuals, a comprehensive and high quality museum specimen-based database of occurrences of freshwater fishes covering the entire state of Texas. We also hope to enlist the help of others to build and improve the provided content via incorporation of their comments, corrections and additional documentation in the form of specimens, field notes and images.
A secondary objective is to promote support of natural history museums as valuable providers of high quality information about increasingly threatened biodiversity, and to improve the ability of scientists, natural resource managers and the public to recognize, understand and conserve that biodiversity. We hope that this project motivates more researchers to deposit specimens in major museum collections. With the advent of online databases like this website, the simple act of donating specimens to a major Natural History Museum quickly and nearly effortlessly achieves for the donor a nearly cost-free but tangible and long-lived contribution to society by making the specimens and associated data permanently available to a broad audience.