Eric Stitt (Chair)
Andy Holycross
Carrie Carreno
Cecil Schwalbe
Dale DeNardo
Dan Cox
Daren Riedle
Eric Zepnewski
Erika Nowak
Jenna Ramsey
Kevin Bonine
Kim Field
Matt Goode
Roy Averill-Murray
Sheridan Stone
Taylor Edwards
Tom Jones
Young Cage

The second order of business was to review a list of “research priorities” generated at last year’s meeting. These included:
Sponsorship and funding
Support (reactive approaches)
Advisory/advocacy (proactive approach)
Synthesis
Database of research

We then opened discussion to all other ideas and worked through lunch, during which we brainstormed additional potential roles for the working group. Ideas generated during that session included:
Volunteer coordination
Science advisory (recommendations to funding groups)
Link between other working groups and funding
Database of funding sources
Research priorities of funding agencies
New Current Research on Herpetofauna of the Sonoran Desert symposium

After much debate on all these issues, we agreed that our role would be to facilitate information sharing between researchers, and that this would be largely a web-based effort. We identified 2 general categories of priority. The first, Web-based Information Dissemination, would include databases of researchers and their work, current and historic literature, volunteer postings, available funding sources, and a bibliography of gray literature (with links to pdf files of AZFD documents). The second, Research Advocacy and Identifying Research Needs, would have our group identify areas of research where there was a critical need for information that was not being met. We might then make recommendations or requests to suitable funding sources and influence where research dollars were spent. It was generally felt that, although we may aspire to this role in the future, this was not a charge that we should take on immediately.

We decided that the first task to undertake as a working group would be to establish a web-based database of herpetological workers in Arizona. We envision this as a comprehensive effort, inclusive of all state, federal, academic, and non-affiliated people who work with amphibians and reptiles. We would post a web-page for each person summarizing their work, collaborators, taxa on which they perform research, and other information. Links from that page might direct a reader to the researcher’s own web page or CV, to other researchers, to the researcher’s affiliation, or to other places of interest. We envision the database as being searchable by name, taxon, or location. We assigned tasks to working group members and will talk to Tom Brennan (Web Chair) about the feasibility of this project and about other related issues.