Innovations

Finding the Baseline

A BIODIVERSITY ROLL CALL in Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains

Over 10,000 species identified, 427of them new to science. It sounds exotic, downright Amazonian, but in factthis reach into the unknown is happening in down-home Tennessee.

Theproject is called the All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory (ATBI). Its goalis to discover the entire range of biodiversity within Great Smoky Mountains National Park.By any standard, it’s a massive undertaking—with potentially massive implications.ATBI is already unearthing an unexpected number of species. The originalpurpose was to provide a detailed baseline of biodiversity against whichto measure future change. But the data collected here could raise ecoinformaticsto a new level, allowing resource managers to examine and model ecosystemsin greater detail than ever before.

SinceATBI’s beginning in 1998, it has sampled everything from vertebrates downto microorganisms. Much collecting is done passively: moths and flies arelured into traps by black lights, while bacteria and slime molds are incubatedfrom soil. Now and then a couple of dozen researchers and volunteers descendon the park for an intense weekend of active gathering. One such 24-hourfeeding frenzy bagged 850 species of moths and butterflies—53 of them newto science.

Evenas collecting continues, ATBI is already advancing beyond a simple Noah’s-Ark-stylecatalogue. At sites where species are found, teams are collecting detailedgeological, topographical, soil, and vegetation data. According to ChuckParker, a U.S. Geological Survey biologist, these data are already beingcrunched into ecological models for a variety of purposes.

Parkercites a recent bird survey. “Using those results,” he says, “they wereable to produce probability distribution maps for the bird species thatoccur in the park, and this allows us to predict where each species islikely to be found.” As this story goes to press, these maps are beingoverlaid with ozone pollution maps to determine which species are sufferingthe worst exposure and therefore warrant the closest inspection in ozone-impact studies.And within six months, distribution maps for trees and soil-dwelling specieswill similarly be overlaid with acid-deposition maps. ATBI data are evenhelping the park manage infrastructure development. A current proposalfor 50 kilometers of new paved road means that 80 kilometers of possibleroad corridor must be assessed for environmental impact—a huge task. Sothe park staff is using ATBI species-distribution maps to predict whichcorridor sites are likely to contain rare species; assessment of thosesites will be given priority.

Theproject will eventually create a web page for each species. Only a coupleof hundred species are up so far, but these web pages are intended to gobeyond your basic field guide. “We want to make it distinctive for theSmokies,” says Discover Life in America officerJeanie Hilten, based at the Twin Creeks Natural Resource Center in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. “Wewant to link organisms with other organisms in an ecological way.” A fishspecies web page would eventually link to information on its parasites,predators, prey, competition, and preferred ecological milieu.

Plentyof geographic and taxonomic areas remain to be sampled

in Great Smoky. Meanwhile Keith Langdon, supervisory biologist at the park,hopes that a broader North American effort will emerge. “We’re looking fora half-dozen other parks or reserves,” he says, “that would cover the greatestbreadth of the U.S.” Inaddition to Great Smoky, representative ecosystems might include Sonorandesert, Alaskan tundra, temperate grassland, alpine forest, Caribbean Island,and a temperate estuarine location like Point Reyes National Seashore in California.That’s not an exhaustive list of relevant ecosystems, and Langdon wouldn’tdiscourage small parks from participating. What might seem a daunting barrier,though, is cost. But for all its accomplishments,ATBI has actually squeaked by on less than US$200,000 per year. This is becauseit utilizes volunteers for much of the collecting, while recruiting self-fundeduniversity researchers to identify species and do further collecting. Ifother national parks undertake ATBI-like efforts, the challenge will be toavoid competing for the same academic researchers.

ATBI operates as a marriage between the National ParkService (NPS) and the nonprofit organization Discover Life in America (DLIA).The NPS secures government funding, coordinates permits, and provides logisticsupport. Meanwhile, DLIA recruits lay volunteers, photographers, and university-basedresearchers. For more information, visit the Discover Life in America website

About the Author:

Douglas Fox is a freelance writer based in San Francisco, California.