William J. Koster Field Journals

The Division of Fishes at the University of New Mexico Museum of Southwestern Biology offers access to an archive of historic field notes authored by William J. Koster, UNM's first Professor of Vertebrate Zoology. This is an ongoing project, and as part of its mission to serve as an educational resource for the University of New Mexico community and beyond, the project's goals are to digitally capture field notes associated with the Museum of Southwestern Biology fish collections and make them available for online querying and browsing.

Current grant funding has allowed for William Koster's field notes dating between 1939 and 1956 to be the first to be available. Subsequent funding opportunities will allow the Museum to add expended content from Koster's field research as well as other biologists who have contributed to the Museum's collections of flora and fauna from New Mexico and the southwestern United States.

William J. Koster's field notes are presented here as an online archive of information from his surveys of populations and life histories of fish species collected from the Rio Grande, San Juan, Gila and Pecos River drainage's. Koster's field notes are in Adobe PDF format.