GBIF Β· Great Basin Β· Endangered Fishes Β· Paleolakes
🐟 Survivors of an Inland Sea
Fifteen thousand years ago, Lake Lahontan covered 22,800 kmΒ² of the western Great Basin. Pyramid Lake is what’s left, and its fish are survivors: the cui-ui, a lake sucker that lives nowhere else on Earth, and the Lahontan cutthroat trout that set the 41-pound world record. This project floods today’s terrain to the ancient 1,335 m shoreline and maps every GBIF record of five native fishes over it.
Derby Dam, the dry bed of Winnemucca Lake, the fishway at Marble Bluff, and the Pilot Peak trout that DNA from a UNR lab proved were the lost Pyramid Lake giants. With a look back at heat shock proteins in fish from my own UNR days.
GBIF Β· Sierra Nevada Β· Native Trout Β· Stocking History
🐟 Two Creeks of Gold
California’s state fish evolved in just two streams on the Kern Plateau: Golden Trout Creek and the South Fork Kern. In 1876 a coffee can carried 13 of them over the Sierra crest, and a century of pack trains and hatcheries spread them into high lakes across the West. This project maps every GBIF record of the golden trout and the threatened Little Kern golden trout over Copernicus terrain.
Only 288 of 1,133 records are on the Kern Plateau; Idaho alone has 333. Plus hybrids, brown trout, cattle in the meadows, and creeks that hit 26 Β°C in summer.
GBIF Β· Museum Specimens Β· Climate Β· Elevation
🪨 What’s Up With the Pikas?
The American pika can die after a couple of hours at 28–30 °C, which made it the poster animal of climate change in the mountains. Field resurveys disagree on how worried to be. This project pulls all 16,891 GBIF records of Ochotona princeps, adds the ground elevation under each one, and goes back to 276 museum localities collected between 1871 and 1949 to ask whether anyone has recorded a pika there since 2000.
Comparing all old records with all new ones says pikas moved 246 m uphill, but that mostly measures where hikers go. Matched site by site, the old localities that have been re-found have modern records at nearly the same elevation, and the lowest third for their latitude are re-found far less often: 39%, against 62% and 59%.
GBIF Β· Guadeloupe Β· Island Evolution Β· Species Distribution
π¦ ANOLE-WATCH
One lizard, stranded on six islands, became six species. ANOLE-WATCH maps every GBIF record of the Anolis marmoratus complex across Guadeloupe and its satellite islets: the Marie-Galante giant, the golden-eyed anole of Petite Terre, and the Kahouanne anole, whose entire range is two rocks off Basse-Terre.
The data had its own mysteries. Sixty-nine records were parked on a generic "Guadeloupe" point, and the golden-eyed anole turned up 60 km from home because Petite Terre and Les Saintes both have an island called Terre-de-Haut. Quality flags set those aside without deleting them, and a GitHub Action refreshes everything weekly.
iNaturalist Β· Death Valley Β· Citizen Science Β· Species Distribution
πΎ DIPODOMYS
An interactive data portrait of the two kangaroo rat species that share Death Valley β Dipodomys deserti (the desert specialist) and D. merriami (the continent-wide generalist). Live occurrence data from iNaturalist on every page load. Leaflet map with MarkerCluster, temporal analysis showing the citizen science explosion after 2012, and elevation charts revealing the microhabitat partitioning between species.
One HTML file. No frameworks, no build system, no cached data. Six API calls on page load, everything rendered client-side. The design philosophy mirrors the ecology: specialization where it matters, nothing extraneous.
The Citizen Science Revolution
iNaturalist has fundamentally changed what is possible in ecological research. A dataset that would have required years of fieldwork can now be assembled in seconds via API call. The temporal analysis in DIPODOMYS shows the explosion clearly β a flat line of museum specimen records from the early 20th century, modest upticks from mid-century field surveys, then a near-vertical spike after 2012 as iNaturalist reached critical mass.
But the bias is real and worth naming: we know more about where these animals were seen in 2023 than in 1983 not because their range changed, but because observer coverage changed. Understanding what the data doesn't show is as important as understanding what it does.
Habitat Partitioning
Where the two species meet β as they do across Death Valley's sandy flats β they partition microhabitats. Deserti takes the open dunes. Merriami works the surrounding scrub. The boundary is ecological, not geographic β drawn in seed patches and burrow densities and nightly foraging circuits.
The elevation chart in DIPODOMYS shows this directly: deserti clusters near and below sea level on the valley floor. Merriami spreads across a wider elevation range, turning up on bajadas, in canyons, on the surrounding ranges. Two species, same valley, different vertical worlds.
