Gunnar M. Brune

Gunnar Brune was a geologist for the U.S. Soil Conservation Service and the Texas Water Development Board. He is remembered for his decades of meticulous fieldwork documenting thousands of springs across Texas, providing flow, chemical, archeological, historical and biological notes. Brune’s analysis provided key baseline evidence for the disappearance of many of the springs due to over-pumping under the Texas “rule of capture”. His work examining 281 principal springs appeared in the Texas Water Development Board’s Report 189, Major and Historical Springs of Texas (1975). He later published Springs of Texas: Volume 1 (1981), covering 2900 springs in 183 of the state’s 254 counties. Subsequently, the researcher Helen Besse surveyed roughly 1800 springs in the remaining 71 counties, a “donut” encircling central Texas, and provided the records to databases and archives at the State of Texas and the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment.