The Death Valley expedition 1891, with Descriptions of New Species"". The Death Valley expedition The Death Valley expedition was an 1891 expedition to discover the geographic distributions of plants (phytogeography) and animals in California's Death Valley. It was the first of a series of expeditions funded by an 1890 act of the United States Congress. The expedition included biologists, naturalists, botanists, and zoologists. They produced valuable reports of historic significance in several fields, including ""Botany of the Death Valley Expedition"", "“The Death Valley Expedition: A Biological Survey of Parts of California, Nevada, Arizona, and Utah”", and ""Annotated List of the Reptiles and Batrachians Collected
Death Valley pupfish Soda Lake, in Death Valley National Park. The desert pupfish has been classified as endangered by the IUCN due to its extremely restricted distribution (if the two extant locations were treated as a single unit, it would be considered critically endangered). Numbers of individuals at the locations are highly seasonally variable, and fluctuate with water level and flow volume. While the entire range of the species is located in a protected area, it may be under threat from accidental introduction of non-native species, local catastrophic events, and excessive pumping of the aquifer that feeds the habitat. Death Valley pupfish The