Development of a computer information system
for wildlife conservation in Louisiana, with a
prototype system for fishes
Henry L. Bart Jr. and Nelson E. Rios
Tulane University Museum of Natural History
Belle Chasse, Louisiana
&
Frank L. Pezold, III
College of Science and Technology
Texas A&M University
Corpus Christi, Texas
Funding provided the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries
Objectives
• Create a prototype Louisiana Wildlife Conservation Network for
fish data linking natural history collection and Louisiana State
wildlife databases
• Georeference data in the University of Louisiana- Monroe Fish
Collection and all records from GBIF for species identified at risk
in Louisiana.
• Develop an online portal to query and map networked data for
the purposes of conservation
• Develop an online database to capture Louisiana Scientific
Collecting Permit data
• Utilize the Louisiana Wildlife Conservation Network to analyze
trends in occurrence and abundance for Louisiana's threatened
and endangered inland fishes over time & model critical habitat
areas
Use Cases
The Louisiana Fish & Wildlife Conservation
portal may be used to:
1) Analyze trends in occurrence and abundance of
Louisiana’s rare, threatened and endangered fishes
over time
2) Model known and potential critical habitat of all
rare and protected fishes
3) Analyze changes in land use and land cover in
areas supporting rare and protected fishes
4)Identify areas and/or species in need of greater
monitoring and sampling
End Users
HTML over HTTP
XML over
HTTP
uBio
Name Bank
Louisiana Wildlife
Conservation portal
XML over HTTP
XML over HTTP
(DwC)
Natural History Collections
TUMNH
ULM
FMNH
TAMU
TNHC
State Wildlife Databases
Permit
DB
LADWF
Data Entry
portal
LNHP
Darwin Core (DwC v1.20)
•
•
XML Schema designed to facilitate the exchange of information about the
geographic occurrence of species and the existence of specimens in
collections
Schema used to serve natural history collections data
DateLastModified
InstitutionCode
CollectionCode
CatalogNumber
ScientificName
BasisOfRecord
Kingdom
Phylum
Class
Order
Family
Genus
Species
Subspecies
ScientificNameAuthor
IdentifiedBy
YearIdentified
MonthIdentified
DayIdentified
TypeStatus
CollectorNumber
FieldNumber
Collector
YearCollected
MonthCollected
DayCollected
JulianDay
TimeOfDay
ContinentOcean
Country
StateProvince
County
Locality
Longitude
Latitude
CoordinatePrecision
MinimumElevation
MaximumElevation
MinimumDepth
MaximumDepth
Sex
PreparationType
IndividualCount
PreviousCatalogNumber
RelationshipType
RelatedCatalogItem
Notes
Capturing Scientific Permit Data
Data Cleaning & Enhancement
1)
2)
3)
4)
Correction of lower administrative units
Georeferencing
Taxonomic resolution
Geospatial enhancements (hucs & eco
regions)
Georeferencing Legacy Data
Import
Locality Data
Batch Process
via GEOLocate
Specimen
Database
(ver. 3.11)
Collaborative
Georeferencing
Export Data
Verify & Correct
via GEOLocate
Taxonomic Name Resolution
• Universal Biological
Indexer and Organizer
(uBio)
• Synonym and common
name resolution
services
• Unresolved names
marked for review and
examined by graduate
students
Web Portal
Public, web-based interface through which fish and
wildlife biologists access specimen data
1) Caches data from DiGIR providers
2) Textual & geospatial query and visualization
3) Provides access to “Species Pages”
4) Web-based interface to allow Scientific
Collecting Permit holders to enter collecting
data
Conservation summaries
produced by graduate
students for each of the
rare, threatened or
endangered species
within Louisiana
Species Profiles
Future Directions
• Expand the LFWCN system to coverage that includes the
entire United States
• Expand the number of data providers
• Make key features of the system (species distribution and
niche modeling, species profile modeling, and population
sampling and abundance trends analysis) dynamic, so
that users of the system can generate all of these models
on the fly as new data are encountered
• Improved taxonomic resolution via geography and cooccurring species
• Notification Services – Alert me when new records of
Redfish in Bayou St. John are collected; Send me a
monthly report on collecting activities in Caddo Parish