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Nature Conservancy volunteer Rick Norwood wins Texas Environmental Excellence Award from TCEQ

Award earned for development of database for monitoring endangered songbirds at Fort Hood

SAN ANTONIO—A retired Texas Department of Transportation assistant director who volunteered to help Fort Hood and The Nature Conservancy protect endangered songbirds has earned the state’s highest environmental achievement, the Texas Environmental Excellence Award. Norwood is among 12 winners statewide to be recognized with an award, presented by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

Norwood will receive the award – in the individual achievement category – May 2 at the 2007 Texas Environmental Excellence Awards banquet in Austin.

Norwood was nominated for the award by Rich Kostecke, Ph.D., project scientist with The Nature Conservancy’s Fort Hood Project. “We nominated Rick for his work on FAMAS, the Fort Hood Avian Management System, the database system that now holds all of our bird data,” Kostecke said. “He certainly deserves the recognition for all his hard work for us over the years.”

Norwood devoted hundreds of hours to analyzing individual databases, some of which dated as far back as 1980. From these he created one all-encompassing program, FAMAS,  delivering the completed version in 2005.

Fort Hood contains significant populations of the endangered black-capped vireos and golden-cheeked warblers, Kostecke explained. “Monitoring, management and research on these two endangered species is perhaps more intensive on Fort Hood than anywhere else within the species’ ranges, so the work we do in partnership with Fort Hood plays a substantial role in the recovery of these two birds,” he said.

However, for long-term monitoring to have a widespread impact, scientists must get the word out on what they learn at Fort Hood, he added. FAMAS facilitates this process by housing all of the data in a single location where it can be easily recovered for input into scientific analyses.

“Creating – and getting people to use – a complex, relational database that contains all of one’s ecological/environmental monitoring data is easier said than done,” Kostecke added. “Housing of all of Fort Hood’s long-term endangered songbird monitoring data in a single database was quite an accomplishment.”

Norwood continues to refine the Fort Hood Avian Management System. Nature Conservancy staff members estimate that Norwood’s work has saved the organization many hundreds of thousands of dollars in development fees for this monitoring and research tool.

The TCEQ annually presents the Texas Environmental Excellence Awards to environmental projects across the state that demonstrate excellence in resource conservation, waste reduction and pollution prevention. The award-winning programs reflect the goals of the TCEQ itself: to protect Texas’ human and natural resources and ensure clean air, clean water, and the safe management of waste.

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The Nature Conservancy is the leading conservation organization working to protect the most ecologically important lands and waters around the world for nature and people. To date, the Conservancy and its more than one million members have been responsible for the protection of more than 15 million acres in the United States and have helped preserve more than 102 million acres in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific. Visit The Nature Conservancy on the Web at nature.org. In the Lone Star State, The Nature Conservancy of Texas owns 35 nature preserves and conservation projects and assists private landowners to conserve their land through more than 70 voluntary land-preservation agreements. The Nature Conservancy of Texas protects 250,000 acres of wild lands and, with partners, has conserved close to a million acres for wildlife habitat across the state. Visit The Nature Conservancy of Texas on the Web at nature.org/texas.