Lick Creek Park, a municipal (College Station, Texas) natural area, provides the general public and Life Science students an opportunity to explore and enjoy natural habitats of central Texas.  Given extensive commercial development in this particular area, the park was established to shelter local populations of the endangered orchid, Spiranthes parksii, in 1986.  Thus, Botany faculty of the TAMU Herbarium working with the endangered species were involved with interactions among State, Federal, and municipal agencies that resulted in creation of the park, and we have been active, with other Life Science faculty at Texas A&M, to develop the area as an educational resource and research site.  TAMU Herbarium web products relating to the park include Plants of Lick Creek Park and field trip pages for Botany 301 and Botany 620.

    Future work with the park will require an ability to locate specific locations within the park boundaries and undergraduate research projects are focused on this objective.  Our goal is to eventually combine raw materials and technologies relating to digital mapping to produce a 'locator' website that allows any public user to locate specific sites within the park.  We are now working with this photographic image of the park (click on the image for a 1,267 kb jpeg file):
 

    Botany 485 student Justin Custer has been working, in collaboration with specialists from the City of College Station and campus departments, to develop a locator mapping system using AutoCad mapping files and ArcView software with the imapper extension.  See his most recent prototype.