Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units Program: Tennessee
Education, Research and Technical Assistance for Managing Our Natural Resources

This study represents the initiation project for the creation of a comprehensive freshwater mussel database for the state of Tennessee, which can not only serve the multiple agencies and stakeholders tasked with the management and conservation of the state’s biota, but also as the basis for multiple research and conservation initiatives (see attached). Our objective for this proposal is to compile freshwater mussel historic and current records from the Duck River Drainage, Tennessee and organize them into a concise, spatially explicit, expandable, and method-specific database, specifically using the McClung Museum database as a model and starting point. We will also organize the data in an expandable, attributable, spatial, and open-source format to improve user capacity and speed for analyzing trends of species distribution, richness, and abundance. We will produce not only the data outcomes below, but also an underlying structure, location, curation, presentation, and long-term plan for a living, statewide database that will be the core foundation of a long-term research program proposed by the Tennessee Cooperative Fishery Research Unit, with the goal of a long-term interactive database housed and maintained within the TN Tech Water Center (see letter of support attached).