Stephan Magnelia

Texas River Access and Conservation Areas: A Case Study in Use of Riparian Leases to Enhance Angler Access and Facilitate River Stewardship

SEAFWA Journal Volume 7, March 2020

Texas contains 307,752 km of streams, creeks and rivers, including 64,686 km of perennially flowing waters. The state maintains public navigability laws that ensure the rights of paddlers and anglers to wade and float many Texas creeks and rivers. However, private ownership of riverbanks limits the number of locations where the public can legally access those waters from land. To confront this reality, Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD) and cooperating organizations built partnerships with private riparian landowners to expand fishing and paddling opportunities on publicly...

Application and Utility of a Low-cost Unmanned Aerial System to Manage and Conserve Aquatic Resources in Four Texas Rivers

SEAFWA Journal Volume 2, March 2015

Low-cost unmanned aerial systems (UAS) have recently gained increasing attention in natural resources management due to their versatility and demonstrated utility in collection of high-resolution, temporally-specific geospatial data. This study applied low-cost UAS to support the geospatial data needs of aquatic resources management projects in four Texas rivers. Specifically, a UAS was used to (1) map invasive salt cedar (multiple species in the genus Tamarix) that have degraded instream habitat conditions in the Pease River, (2) map instream meso-habitats and structural habitat features...