Established in 1964, the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species has evolved to become the world’s most comprehensive information source on the global conservation status of animal, fungi and plant species.

The Desert Fishes Council (DFC) is a non-profit (registered with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service in 1988) professional organization founded in 1969 with the mission of preserving "the biological integrity of desert aquatic ecosystems and their associated life forms, to hold symposia to report related research and management endeavors, and to effect rapid dissemination of information concerning activities of the Council and its members" (http://desertfishes.org). Fulfillment of that mission from the start included the production of a comprehensive report on all meeting activities (business meeting + abstracts of presented papers and posters) that was disseminated to the membership as the "Proceedings of the Desert Fishes Council". After 20 years of production and editing by Phil Pister, in 1990, Dean Hendrickson assumed editorship, producing the 1990-1994 volumes. Starting with the 1992 content, the editorial workflow changed from paper originals to all content being digital from abstract submission through published digital annual volumes available from the DFC website, and the Proceedings were formally registered as a serial publication (ISSN 1068-0381). Gary Garrett served as editor for the 1995-1996 volumes, and Hendrickson and Garret co-edited the 1997-1998 volumes. Hendrickson and Lloyd Findley served as co-editors for 1999-2007, adding Spanish translations of all abstracts. Following a decision by the Executive Committee to cease translation after the 2007 volume, Hendrickson continued as sole editor from 2008 to present. From the beginning, bound hard copies of the Proceedings were mailed to DFC members and a variable number of selected, mostly academic libraries, but around 2000, distribution switched exclusively to email and downloading from the internet. Eventually, all pre-1992 Proceedings issues were scanned to PDFs which were made available from the website, but, with conversion of the workflow to abstract submission direct to an online database in 2008, the classical content of the Proceedings became fragmented, with minutes of the meetings published each year on the website and a separate online abstracts database. Thus, even as the 50th anniversary of the DFC approached, the historical content of its Proceedings, though all available in digital format, remained scattered across many different files and formats, making comprehensive searching of the complete content laborious. At the time of finalizing this abstract (October 2018) and the compiled file here described, post-2007 abstracts of papers presented at the meetings were searchable from the website via the online abstract database, and the 1992-2007 PDFs of the annual Proceedings (all originally digital content) were separately searchable by downloading the annual files into PDF reader programs. The 1969-1991 volumes were also each searchable in the same way, but their textual (searchable) content, the product of automated Optical Character Recognition (OCR) done when that technology was still young, had many errors. Here, we provide the first single, text-based PDF file that brings the entire history of the DFC together in one place. The newer OCR technology used in this file produced much better results with the older content than what is found in the separate PDFs on the DFC website, and single searches of this file now extend across the complete history of DFC to present, greatly improving the utility of the archive for historical and scientific research. It is hoped that as more new content is appended, updates of this file will be produced, that remaining OCR errors (though less prevalent than in the early volumes) can eventually be corrected, and that the post-2007 meeting minutes lacking in this file can also be added, making this now permanently archived and openly available file a one-stop resource for the large corpus of historical and scientific conservation-related research built by the 4 editors authoring this archive, and by all of the members of the DFC who contributed content over the first half century of DFC's history.

Native Fish Conservation Areas of the southwestern USA consist of springs, ciénegas, creeks, rivers, and associated watersheds uniquely valued in preservation of freshwater fish diversity. These freshwater systems were identified through a spatial prioritization approach that identifies areas critically important to the long-term persistence of focal fish species. Through a shared mission of collaborative stewardship, conservation partnerships have formed among non-governmental organizations, universities, and state and federal agencies to plan and deliver actions to restore and preserve native freshwater fishes and aquatic habitats within the Native Fish Conservation Areas. Furthermore, the Native Fish Conservation Areas have increased awareness of the ecological, recreational, and economic values of freshwater systems in the region, and helped increase interest and capacity of local landowners, communities, and recreational users (e.g., paddlers, anglers) to act as advocates and local stewards of these systems. By facilitating partnership development, coordinating multi-species, watershed-based conservation planning, and leveraging technical and financial resources toward strategic conservation investments, Native Fish Conservation Areas have served as a catalyst for collaborative, science-based stewardship of native freshwater fishes and aquatic habitats in the southwestern USA. Efforts described herein to prioritize and deliver a network of Native Fish Conservation Areas in the southwestern USA offer a successful case study in multi-species and watershed approaches to freshwater fish conservation transferrable to other states and regions of the USA. This report offers a synthesis of recent (2011-2018) multi-species aquatic assessments, Native Fish Conservation Area prioritizations, conservation planning, and conservation delivery within the southwestern USA explicitly focused on implementation of the Native Fish Conservation Areas approach.

This database has roots in 4 previous compilations on ciénegas: 1) Hendrickson, Dean A., and W.L. Minckley. 1985. “Ciénegas - Vanishing Climax Communities of the American Southwest.” Desert Plants 6 (3): 131–75; 2) Minckley, T.A., D.S. Turner, and S.R. Weinstein. 2013. “The Relevance of Wetland Conservation in Arid Regions: A Re-Examination of Vanishing Communities in the American Southwest.” Journal of Arid Environments 88: 213–21. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jaridenv.2012.09.001; 3) Minckley, Thomas A., Andrea Brunelle, and Dale Turner. 2013. “Paleoenvironmental Framework for Understanding the Development, Stability, and State-Changes of Ciénegas in the American Deserts.” In RMRS-P-67: Merging Science and Management in a Rapidly Changing World: Biodiversity and Management of the Madrean Archipelago III and 7th Conference on Research and Resource Management in the Southwestern Deserts; 2012 May 1-5; Tucson, AZ, edited by Gerald J. Gottfried, Ffolliott, Brooke S. Gebow, Lane G. Eskew, and Loa C. Collins, RMS-P-67:77–83. Rocky Mountain Research Station Proceedings. Fort Collins, Colorado: : U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station. http://www.fs.fed.us/rm/pubs/rmrs\_p067.html; 4) Cole, A.T., and Cinda Cole. 2015. “An Overview of Aridland Ciénagas, with Proposals for Their Classification, Restoration, and Preservation.” In, Kathy Whiteman and William Norris (editors). Proceedings of the Fourth Natural History of the Gila Symposium, October 25–27, 2012. Western New Mexico University, Silver City, New Mexico. New Mexico Botanist Special Issue 4:28–56. http://gilasymposium.org/ and http://hdl.handle.net/2152/30285 (A static copy of the data from this paper is permanently archived, together with a copy of the complete paper, at http://hdl.handle.net/2152/30285, and the same static copy of the data are available in interactive (fusion table) format at https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1C6hbgWSgIPozfzO\_iFnefTERxp5rYoUAuT78XmYs). Now, this second fusion table-served database by Dean A. Hendrickson and Thomas A. Minckley implements the wishes of the Coles and Hendrickson as they began their collaboration. Here we combined the data from Cole and Cole (2015) and the data from Minckley et al 2013, as well as other data from our own knowledge bases and resources, and provide that content freely to the world (within constraints of the license on this fusion table) in this easily explored format. We are also implementing mechanisms to incorporate input of others to provide a dynamic, community-based, growing and constantly improving resource for the study and conservation of ciénegas. We hope that this database can now start to evolve and improve via contributions from a broader community of interested individuals. Since the initial compilation of Cole and Cole 2015 + Minckley at al 2013 (totaling 353 records), we have continued to sporadically add records as more information is provided to us (on Sept 13, 2018, record 366 was added). We hope to eventually add user-contributed photos and other improvements. In addition to data on occurrences and condition of ciénegas, we also have a shared, intermittently updated library of bibliographic metadata with links to publications (https://www.zotero.org/groups/north\_american\_cienegas). We invite users to contribute their bibliographic data, photos and pdfs to this collection, and to help us keep it, and this database, updated.

The primary aim of this grant was to work with Texas Parks and Wildlife (TPWD), Texas Advanced Computing Center (University of Texas at Austin), and other collaborators to (1) utilize Fishes of Texas Project (FoTX) data to aid in conservation of Texas fishes, (2) conduct field surveys in under-sampled areas of conservation interest, and (3) further develop the FoTX database and website as a research and management tool. While much of our work focused on Species of Greatest Conservation Need (SGCN), almost everything we did was applied to all species, or affected data for all species. This report documents how FoTX’s specimen-based data were used to produce species distribution models that, in turn, fed into prioritization analyses that led to official creation of Native Fish Conservation Areas (NFCAs) that are now becoming the foundation of aquatic resource conservation prioritization and management in Texas. Our data were also used by TPWD staff to update the Texas Natural Diversity Database, previously depauperate for fish data, and to develop state and global conservation rankings for fishes using NatureServe’s standard methodology. Using FoTX data, we also developed recommendations for updating TPWD’s SGCN list, which will inform conservation in Texas for many years. We also expanded the scope of FoTX beyond Texas, throughout entire drainages, thus reducing biases and analytical complications related to our previous political boundary that lacked a biogeographical basis. We also added many new records from new types of data sources, especially agency databases that complement the museum specimen data to provide a more thorough, updated and unbiased dataset for analyzing temporal and spatial trends in fish faunas. The FoTX website’s checklists were improved in many ways to increase their utility to resource managers, and the site also now accesses occurrence data held in formerly inaccessible, but now digitized and easily accessed documents. We used diverse resources and our occurrence data to determine native ranges for all Texas fishes, and now visualize them in our website's maps, so when viewed alongside occurrence data, users can more easily recognize and explore spatial and temporal trends. We focused another effort at understanding range changes through time, and produced dynamic graphs, that when fully implemented will update automatically as underlying data evolve, depicting and statistically describing locational and general range size changes through time. In addition to database and website work, we were also in the field alongside, and in close coordination with, TPWD staff, focusing on collecting areas previously lacking data, or where there were other conservation-related reasons for sampling. The resultant thousands of new specimens and tissue samples deposited and permanently housed in the University of Texas Biodiversity Collections now provide new, modern data points for ongoing conservation actions. In summary, this project allowed FoTX to continue to grow and diversify, moving away from focusing solely on archiving and improving the data to applying those data in diverse ways that maximize their value for conservation. The project also greatly increased collaborations between FoTX and TPWD staff, and inspired a Herps of Texas Project templated on the FoTX database schema and website, thus providing an efficient pathway for getting that project to a similar state, with the added advantage of a high level of inter-compatibility of most improvements across both sites. Our hope is that other projects, focusing on other taxa, continue to follow in our footsteps, allowing mutual benefit, and eventually query interfaces that provide users access to high quality data for entire ecological communities.