Freshwater fishes are globally among the most imperiled major biodiversity groups and they are especially endangered in the North American deserts of the vast binational Desert LCC. Sixty seven native fish species of conservation concern are in the study area, which includes all of the DLCC in both the US and Mexico. Essentially all species in our study area are understudied and management of them has been greatly impeded by the intrinsic difficulties of working internationally and by relative lack of, or inaccessibility to, basic knowledge about their distributions and conservation status. We propose to mine data from all online and known US-based institutions holding specimen-based occurrence records from our study area. We will normalize and generally improve data quality to provide a comprehensive, high quality resource that brings together in one GIS-accessible database all of the currently very scattered and relatively un-normalized museum-based records. We will focus our efforts on data for the Rio Grande basin, which will receive more rigorous and thorough normalization, and manual georeferencing with precision estimates, than will data for the remainder of the study area. In the Rio Grande, we will also do basic quality control on taxonomy and georeferencing following published protocols and use the data to produce Species Distribution Models (SDMs) for selected priority, special interest native and invasive fishes. SDMs will be constructed for present conditions and three projected climate change scenarios to allow us to assess current and projected future status throughout each species’ range, thus filling vast information gaps throughout data-poor areas in Mexico that might prove vital as source or sink habitats. Projected future distributions will identify landscape-level areas of conservation and restoration priority that may not presently be of high priority, but that may become so in the future. The varying projections under varied climate change scenarios will allow for quantitative assessment of uncertainties. Both the raw occurrence data and current and future SDMs will be valuable tools for diverse future work on regional aquatic biodiversity sustainability in the face of climate change.
