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Hugg Distribution Maps |
The following letter describing the distribution maps published here was received from Denny Hugg, producer of the maps, at the time he started contributing the files. Send e-mail to lss@radix.net to report any errors you might find in the maps.
18 Feb. 95
Dear Dr. Hendrickson:
These files are an export product of a computer program called "MAPFISH". Written in Turbo Pascal, with assembler elements and a database created with FOXPRO PLUS, MAPFISH combines color scaling-vector digital maps with 256-color 320X200 pixel pictures and a database retrieval system that is unique for small computer systems.
My son Steve, an FSU Senior, and I collaborated in the creation, something that has taken me six years to complete in spare time, outside my regular work with the Louisiana Air National Guard. Steve, my wife Mary Ann and I form Life Science Software, a tiny start-up. Our goal is to produce CD-ROMs of information valuable to life sciences researchers. I must partially retire in less than a year; Steve graduates this summer. We began Life Science Software to raise money to pursue the long-term goal. Steve is a talented programmer with his own company, HAMCO software, producing a world-traveling shareware game and a scheduling and resource-management system for National Guard military employment of personnel.
I have never been able to dispel the excitement and magic of zoology, to which I was introduced at Tulane in the early sixties. If every student was as completely captivated as I was by Drs. R. D. Suttkus and Harold Dundee, there wouldn't be room for us all! Economics and a growing family lead me to choose aviation for security and stability, but with those years behind me, I want to return to an association with biology. Without competitive recent education and experience, the best method I can envision is to try to make a compulsion into a method of livelihood until complete retirement at age 60 gives me relative economic freedom.
I work about two evenings weekly at the Natural History Museum of Tulane's Riverside Campus, through the kindness and indulgence of Dr. Hank Bart Jr. and Mike Taylor. The amassed publication library of Dr. Suttkus is the primary source of information. The baseline data for the MAPFISH database and collection site information came from ATLAS OF N.A. FW FISHES. From that beginning, I am going through COPEIA, AMERICAN MIDLAND NATURALIST, PROCEEDINGS OF AFS, and reprints to update and correct or expand data. I have been struck by the apparent sudden shift of species occurrences at the Mexican border, and by the seeming indifference of many American researchers to the Middle American species. Almost each day I find a fish that is to me totally new and therefore a source of pleasure and excitement. I want to include in MAPFISH all the Central American and Mexican species to make the database truly indicative of all of North America.
Steve and I are recreating MAPFISH for the WINDOWS environment. The most significant result of this has been the conversion of maps from those hand-traced in lat/long on a digitizing tablet to USGS digital line graph (DLG) maps from the public-domain CD-ROM series. This will necessitate complete replotting of collection data for each of nearly 1,000 species, but will tighten up handling of collection data, permit expansion particularly of exotics coverage, and create an opportunity for complete plotting accuracy down to seconds. Graphics presentation has greatly benefited from WINDOWS screen drivers over those available to Pascal and assembler.
We are also beginning MAPHERPS and MAPGULF, using common database and display software that we have created uniquely for these applications and MAPFISH. Our intent is not to make a killing in the grand American tradition, but to enable our company to survive to do things that need doing but have yet to be undertaken. One of these goals is to being together a near- complete picture library of fishes on CD-ROM, with the attendant benefits of low-cost replication. Additional ideas are to scan and publish on CD historically significant references from early investigators, Rafinesque, Jordan & Evermann, Gunther, LeSueur, Regan and the many others whose work we encounter frequently but perhaps do not recognize. Single-species coverage is envisioned for difficult species such as in Cyprinidae (Notropis, Cyprinella, Catostomus, Gila) and Percidae (Etheostoma, Percina). There are many other things that can be and are being done, to include compacting of publications on CD with computer search engines for retrieval.
You will understand, then, how discovery of your WWW pages on 11 Feb. brought me to think about the export maps from MAPFISH for each of your listed species. I will continue to supply them if you find them acceptable for display. You may request any that you need or want. Today I have exported a few species, using PHOTOSTYLER 2.0 to process them into 256-color GIF format, which is both compact and seems the de facto standard on the net. I only have UUENCODE and UUDECODE for conversion to ASCII for transmission. As mentioned, I was unable to overcome a network error generated about 10 lines into the welcome screen of the UTexas FTP system. I will get proficient at BIN2HEX.EXE and try that mode for transmission.
I have enclosed the literature we generally send out on MAPFISH, which explains a little more what we are trying to do. After I study the .html pages from your web site that I saved, I'd like to ask for some information about species I see there that I don't know, and about species that I know that appear under different genera than are familiar.
Thank you for your patience and for taking the trouble to create your most informative web-site.
Sincerely,
Denny Hugg
Life Science Software
55 Elizabeth Court, Mandeville, LA 70448-7552
Last modified:
06 March 2003