The Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program and the San Juan River Endangered Fish Recovery Implementation Program are collaborative programs aimed at recovery of endangered fishes in their respective river basins while allowing for water development in those areas to continue.
As a result of ongoing recovery activities by both recovery programs over the past two decades (primarily stocking and monitoring), a large quantity of data pertaining to both stocked and wild endangered fishes has been collected.
Most of the data involves unique identifiers for individual fish (i.e., PIT or Floy® tag numbers).
These data are currently housed and managed by U. S. Fish and Wildlife personnel working independently for each individual program.
Both programs have recently expressed a desire to enhance efficiency of database management and to support efficient and thorough data analysis.
A web-based master database to serve the data entry, management and retrieval needs of both programs will be required to reach these goals.
The database should be accessible and provide query and download capabilities to all principal investigators (for both entry and retrieval) working within the two programs.
Recent developments which have prompted database improvement include evidence of exchange of tagged fish between the two river basins (and thus the need for the two programs to share information), difficulties identifying individual fish and fish capture histories within existing program databases, occurrence of fish tagged by non-program agency or university research projects, and other factors which generally impede efficiency of data entry and retrieval for both investigators of both programs.