Recent LIS graduate and current Plant Records Manager at the National Tropical Botanical Garden on Kauaʻi presented at the LIS Research Forum on April 21st on his thesis “SIERA-ex: An interdisciplinary LIS thesis from 2025 that continues to inform plant conservation”.
Kevin has been the Plant Records Manager at the National Tropical Botanical Garden since 2017, where he directs living collections field inventory and database management for NTBG gardens and preserves in Hawaiʻi and Florida. Working closely with so many rare species, he has progressively sought to adapt a framework that effectuates the intersectionality of conservation biology and biocultural stewardship. In 2025, Kevin Houck introduced SIERA-ex (Single Island Endemic Representativeness Analysis for ex situ collections), a product of his Library and Information Science Thesis at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. This Kauaʻi-based empirical model and accompanying open-source software application leverages botanical databases and geospatial tools for place-based gap analysis. It introduces metrics for assignment of priority values that incorporate biocultural value and rarity assessments. A case study of nine Kauaʻi species launched SIERA-ex, whereby nearly a dozen underrepresented subpopulations of plants were identified and recommended for conservation priority with varying degrees of urgency. Since launch, additional species have been analyzed, and field collections have been shared and propagated amongst partner nurseries for restoration efforts.
