{"id":9460,"date":"2026-04-23T11:15:49","date_gmt":"2026-04-23T21:15:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/lis\/?p=9460"},"modified":"2026-04-23T11:15:51","modified_gmt":"2026-04-23T21:15:51","slug":"kevin-houck-presents-at-lis-research-forum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/lis\/kevin-houck-presents-at-lis-research-forum\/","title":{"rendered":"Kevin Houck Presents at LIS Research Forum"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Recent LIS graduate and current Plant Records Manager at the National Tropical Botanical Garden on Kaua\u02bbi presented at the LIS Research Forum on April 21st on his thesis &#8220;SIERA-<em>ex<\/em>: An interdisciplinary LIS thesis from 2025 that continues to inform plant conservation&#8221;.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Kevin has been the Plant Records Manager at&nbsp;the National Tropical Botanical Garden since 2017, where&nbsp;he directs living collections field inventory and database&nbsp;management for NTBG gardens and preserves in Hawai\u02bbi&nbsp;and Florida. Working closely with so many rare species, he&nbsp;has progressively sought to adapt a framework that&nbsp;effectuates the intersectionality of conservation biology and&nbsp;biocultural stewardship. In 2025, Kevin Houck introduced&nbsp;SIERA-ex (Single Island Endemic Representativeness Analysis for ex situ collections), a product of his Library and Information Science Thesis at the University of Hawai\u02bbi at M\u0101noa. This Kaua\u02bbi-based empirical model and accompanying open-source software application leverages botanical databases and geospatial tools for place-based gap&nbsp;analysis. It introduces metrics for assignment of priority&nbsp;values that incorporate biocultural value and rarity assessments. A case&nbsp;study&nbsp;of nine Kaua\u02bbi species launched&nbsp;SIERA-ex, whereby nearly a dozen underrepresented&nbsp;subpopulations of plants were identified and recommended&nbsp;for conservation priority with varying degrees of urgency. Since launch, additional species have been analyzed, and field&nbsp;collections have been shared and propagated amongst&nbsp;partner nurseries for restoration efforts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Recent LIS graduate and current Plant Records Manager at the National Tropical Botanical Garden on Kaua\u02bbi presented at the LIS Research Forum on April 21st on his thesis &#8220;SIERA-ex: An interdisciplinary LIS thesis from 2025 that continues to inform plant conservation&#8221;.\u00a0 Kevin has been the Plant Records Manager at&nbsp;the National Tropical Botanical Garden since 2017, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":9461,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-newsroom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/lis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/lis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/lis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/lis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/lis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9460"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/lis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9460\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9462,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/lis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9460\/revisions\/9462"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/lis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/lis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/lis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/lis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}