Smokies project to catalog all life forms spreads to other parks
Now the idea is spreading through the 388-unit national park system and to many state parks, including the 54-unit Tennessee park system that began its own ATBI last year.
“I think it is really exceeding expectations,” Michael Soukup, chief scientist with the National Park Service, said Wednesday during an annual conference on the Smokies program.
“If this effort could prosper I think it would have an enormous impact on how people relate to biodiversity in this nation,” he said, envisioning a headline proclaiming, “Parks are for Americans of All Species.”
The Smokies ATBI began in 1997 as a volunteer-driven, academically oriented exercise modeled after an earlier project in Costa Rica that was never completed for political reasons. Though far from finished, the exercise in the country’s most visited national park is now a model for others.
More than 150 scientists and researchers from California to Maine attended the annual Smokies conference. They came to report on their own studies in the Smokies, a 520,000-acre preserve on the Tennessee-North Carolina border, as well as efforts to start ATBIs on the Colorado Plateau, in the Adirondacks of New York and a state park in southern Ohio.
Soukup said the country’s 57 national parks and 113 other scenic areas are currently engaged in a complementary study to identify their major animal and plant inhabitants to be able to better manage the resources. But an ATBI goes further.
“The ATBI is an intellectual leap,” he said. “It is predicated on the value of all the parts of the (eco-)system, and that there is value in knowing even the obscure stuff that might have tremendous value, but we just don’t know enough.”
Slime molds and fungi, beetles and moths, and salamanders have made up a large portion of the discoveries so far in the Smokies.
But Smokies chief biologist Keith Langdon said their impact may prove to be huge, noting a bacteria found in Yellowstone National Park was the basis for DNA fingerprinting and a slime mold found by University of Georgia researchers could help in Alzheimer’s research.
“We won’t reap the benefit from the scientific knowledge for a few years,” he said. “But the importance of management (is immediate). We are finding so many more things than we thought we had.”
That includes foreign invaders that researchers found while looking for other things, including bugs and blights that are killing beech and hemlock trees, and threatening others.
“It is impressive what they can find and what they can alert us too,” Smokies Superintendent Dale Ditmanson said, crediting these studies with helping managers get a jump on the hemlock wooly adelgid invasion.
The Smokies ATBI had a goal of cataloging everything in the park within 15 years. That might not happen, but interest in the project has grown exponentially.
The nonprofit Discover Life in America organization that coordinates the project says research proposals doubled last year, and Smokies support organizations are helping finance a $4.5 million laboratory that will aid the effort when completed in 2007.
“It is fantastic,” said Brian Strong, head of resource management for the North Carolina park system, which is trying to bolster its own habitat monitoring program.
LinnAnn Welch, biologist for the Tennessee park system, said she is anxious to see what will be discovered in Tennessee’s parks using the Smokies ATBI model. “We are expecting to find a lot of things we don’t know about,” she said.
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On the Net:
Great Smoky Mountains National Park: http://www.nps.gov/grsm
Discover Life in America: http://www.discoverlife.org