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Word from the Smokies: Small species play big role in Great Smoky Mountains | OPINION - Citizen Times

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Frances Figart, GUEST COLUMNIST Published 6:00 a.m. ET May 10, 2020

As Great Smoky Mountains National Park begins to resume its operations in phases over the next few weeks, people are encouraged to avoid crowded areas, maintain social distancing, and follow many other new guidelines for keeping employees, volunteers, and visitors safe.

While we humans are adjusting to the new normal — and hoping to spot iconic megafauna like bear and elk — it’s business as usual for the other 20,389 species of living things that make the park their home. How do we know there are exactly that many?

“That number is only temporary,” says Todd Witcher. “We add new records to our list every month and, now that researchers can resume some of the work they were doing before the park closed, it will increase very soon.”

Witcher is the executive director for Discover Life in America — DLiA for short. He and his team coordinate the All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory, a groundbreaking effort that began 22 years ago to identify and try to understand every species living within the park. It is estimated there could be as many as 80,000!

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Some plants, insects, fish and amphibians exist only in the Southern Appalachian Mountains. Because the Smokies has been above sea level and escaped glaciation for millions of years, it has the perfect conditions to support biodiversity — including the best old-growth watersheds in the eastern U.S.

“Most of the 20,000+ species that reside in GSMNP are lifeforms you wouldn’t notice on a casual hike unless you were looking very, very closely,” says Emma DuFort, publications specialist with Great Smoky Mountains Association. “The important ecosystem services these beetles, algae, mites, lichens, and others perform enable the web of life on which charismatic species like bear and elk ultimately depend.”

DuFort visited the Smokies as a child and returned to live and work here as an adult. She’s taken a special interest in what conservationist E.O. Wilson calls “the little things that run the world.” So much so that she worked with DLiA to create an award-winning perpetual calendar showing one Smokies species for each day of the year.

“What we’ve learned through conducting the All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory in the Smokies has been remarkable,” said NPS entomologist Becky Nichols. “We are learning about species’ distributions, preferred habitats, and relationships with each other. All of this information helps us gain a better understanding of how our ecosystem truly is dependent on biodiversity.”

Some of the world's leading scientists have contributed to the ATBI, along with park staff, educators, and volunteer citizen scientists. Together they have found 9,718 species new to the park and 1,025 species completely new to science! Researching these little-studied life forms not only helps park leaders make better management decisions, it could also hold the key to the next medical breakthrough.

“Nearly half of the drugs that benefit humans are derived from nature’s medicine chest,” Witcher says. “One of the many reasons DLiA was founded was to find new species that may contain qualities that benefit humankind.”

Resources to check out

• Learn about DLiA’s ongoing research at dlia.org.

• Families and classrooms learn about DLiA through the Smokies Species-a-Day perpetual calendar, found at Smokiesinformation.org.

Frances Figart is the editor of Smokies Life magazine and the Creative Services Director for the 34,000-member Great Smoky Mountains Association, an educational nonprofit partner of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Reach her at frances@gsmassoc.org.

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