SEVIERVILLE, Tenn. (AP) – Part of the road work leading from Interstate 40 into the Great Smoky Mountains National Park is about done after nearly 2 1/2 years.

State transportation officials in Knoxville said Tuesday that phase 1 of the work on state Route 66 will be finished by the deadline Nov. 30. Work remaining is final pavement markings and minor sidewalk repair.

A third lane has just been opened to traffic, both northbound and southbound.

Still in progress is widening another part of the road beginning at the I-40 exit. It is on schedule to be done by Nov. 30, 2012.

The highway leads to the resort towns of Sevierville, Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg and then to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. More than 9 million people visit the park annually.

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

SEVIERVILLE, TENN. — Part of the road work leading from Interstate 40 into the Great Smoky Mountains National Park is about done after nearly 2 1/2 years.

State transportation officials in Knoxville said Tuesday that phase 1 of the work on state Route 66 will be finished by the deadline Nov. 30. Work remaining is final pavement markings and minor sidewalk repair.

A third lane has just been opened to traffic, both northbound and southbound.

Still in progress is widening another part of the road beginning at the I-40 exit. It is on schedule to be done by Nov. 30, 2012.

The highway leads to the resort towns of Sevierville, Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg and then to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. More than 9 million people visit the park annually.

PIGEON FORGE, Tenn. (AP) -- Pigeon Forge, Tenn., in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains could be getting riding stables and passenger balloon rides.

Officials have unanimously approved amendments to the resort town’s zoning ordinance, but a further vote is needed.

According to The Mountain Press, businesses are waiting to take advantage of both.

Officials said the riding stables rules were developed with advice from the National Park Service, which oversees horse riding operations in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

   (Copyright 2011 by The Associated Press.  All Rights Reserved.)

GATLINBURG, Tenn. (AP) — Visits to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park fell 9.5 percent in October from the same month in 2010 and year-to-date visits are off more than a half-million.

The National Park Service said there were 1,133,520 visitors last month, compared with 1,252,357 in October 2010. October is one of the stronger months for park visitation because tourists come to see the autumn foliage.

All entrances to the park showed declines last month.

For the first 10 months of 2011, there were 7,931,484 visitors to the 500,000-acre park on the Tennessee-North Carolina border. That was 6.7 percent fewer than at the same time last year — a drop of 568,330 people.

The Smokies remains the most-visited national park.

THE POLAR EXPRESS is a 1 ¼ hour round-trip excursion that comes to life as the train departs the Bryson City, NC depot for an unforgettable journey through the quiet wilderness for a special visit at the North Pole!

Bryson City, North Carolina (PRWEB) November 18, 2011

In 1985, Chris Van Allsburg wrote The Polar Express, a story of a magical train ride on Christmas Eve. The train takes a young boy to the North Pole to receive a special gift from Santa Claus. “The Polar Express,” published by Houghton Mifflin Company, has become a contemporary holiday classic, with over 6 million copies sold worldwide. In 2004 Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc. reunited the Academy Award-winning team of Tom Hanks and director Robert Zemeckis in an inspiring animated version. That same year Great Smoky Mountain Railroad [GSMR] began operating The Polar Express. Last year over 30,000 passengers rode THE POLAR EXPRESS with GSMR, and this year they will welcome it back beginning November 4th and operating through December 24th.

The 1 ¼ hour round-trip excursion comes to life as the train departs the Bryson City depot for a journey through the quiet wilderness for a special visit at the North Pole. Set to the sounds of the motion picture soundtrack, guests on board will enjoy warm cocoa and a treat while listening and reading along with the magical story. Children’s faces show the magic of the season when the train arrives at the “North Pole” to find Santa Claus waiting. Santa will board THE POLAR EXPRESS, greeting each child and presenting them with a special gift as in the story, their own silver sleigh bell. Christmas carols will be sung as they return back to the Bryson City Depot.

Ticket prices begin at $ 39 for adults and $ 26 for children ages 2-12. Children under two years old ride complimentary. For more information and reservations please call 800-872-4681 or visit us online at http://www.GSMR.com. Premium rates apply to Nov 25-27, Dec 17-23 and all Saturday trains.

Crown Class ticket prices are $ 49 for Adults, $ 36 for children 2-12 and $ 10 for less than two years. First Class seating upgrades are available. Each guest will receive a deluxe serving of warm cocoa in a souvenir POLAR EXPRESS mug and other treats in addition to the standard offerings. Upgrade to First Class at $ 59 for adults and $ 41 for children. Children under two years old are $ 15.

Ride THE POLAR EXPRESS Christmas Eve Limited for an evening you will never forget! Each guest will receive a special Christmas souvenir. Adult ticket prices are $ 51 and children 2-12 are $ 37. First Class seating upgrades are also available. Adult ticket prices are $ 72, children 2-12 are $ 50 and $ 20 for less than two years.

*All ticket fares subject to 4% Historic Preservation Fee. Premium rates apply to premium dates.

Smoky Mountain Trains Museum admission is included with all train excursion tickets. Without train excursion admission is $ 9 for Adults and $ 5 for Children.

The Great Smoky Mountain Railroad is an excursion railway providing memorable scenic trips through Western North Carolina. Dedicated to preserving and educating the history of railroading. Proud member of the American Heritage Railways family. Visit our sister railroads in southwest Colorado at the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad and in east Texas at the Texas State Railroad.

About The Polar Express Film:

The Academy Award-winning team of Tom Hanks and director Robert Zemeckis reunite for The Polar Express, an inspiring adventure based on the beloved children’s book by Chris Van Allsburg. When a doubting young boy takes an extraordinary train ride to the North Pole, he embarks on a journey of self-discovery that shows him that the wonder of life never fades for those who believe. Sony Pictures Imageworks and visual effects supervisor Ken Ralston, Oscar winners for their innovative work, help bring the story vividly to the screen in full CG animation through Imageworks’ next-generation motion capture process that allows live-action performances to drive the emotions and movements of the digital characters. The Polar Express will air on ABC and ABC Family’s 25 Days of Christmas in December 2009. Warner Home Video will once again offer The Polar Express in standard-definition, Blu-ray and 3D DVD versions this holiday season.

About The Polar Express Book:

“The Polar Express” movie is based on Chris VanAllburg’s classic holiday picture book, which tells the story of a boy who takes a magical Christmas Eve train ride to the North Pole to receive a special gift from Santa. First published by Houghtin Mifflin Company in 1985, The Polar Express became an instant holiday favorite and has sold more than 6 million copies worldwide. In 1986 it won the prestigious Caldecott Medal for Illustration.

Based on THE POLAR EXPRESS book and characters TM & © 1985 by Chris Van Allsburg.

Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

TM & © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

(s11)

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Sarah Conley
Great Smoky Mtn. Railroad
800-872-4681
Email Information

GATLINBURG, Tenn. — Visits to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park fell 9.5 percent in October from the same month in 2010 and year-to-date visits are off more than a half-million.

The National Park Service said there were 1,133,520 visitors last month, compared with 1,252,357 in October 2010. October is one of the stronger months for park visitation because tourists come to see the autumn foliage.

Gatlinburg Cabin Rentals by GSMVRO Announces No Cost Advertising For 1 Year to Chalet and Cabin Owners in the Smoky Mountains.

Gatlinburg, TN (PRWEB) November 17, 2011

Gatlinburg Cabin Rentals by GSMVRO is proud to announce a limited 1 year vacation rental ad listing at no cost to the first 500 new cabin listings. This offer is available to both homeowners and vacation rental management companies in the Smoky Mountains regions. Gatlinburg TN is proud to be the main portal to the most visited national park in the US. With upwards of 9 million visitors per year Gatlinburg Tennessee and Pigeon Forge are unquestionably one of the top vacation destinations for families and honeymooners alike.

For vacationers planning a visit to the area drop by the GSMVRO Gatlinburg Webcam page that offers live views of the Smokies. There are currently 1000+ Gatlinburg Cabin Rentals and Smoky Mountains chalets currently enjoying the benefits of advertising on the GSMVRO website. There are no tricks or gimmicks with this offer, simply register, enter the vacation rental listing information and enter the coupon code “year free” during the check out procedure no credit card information will ever be needed during this process.

This offer is not limited to Pigeon Forge Cabin Rentals and Gatlinburg Cabins. This offer applies to cabins and chalets located anywhere in the Smokies or Blue Ridge Mountains. GSMVRO invites Smokies cabin owners to give their website a 100% no risk test drive for 1 year. If the property owner/s are not satisfied with the quantity of inquiries they receive, simply do not renew the listing at the end of the year. This offer represents a $ 299 value.

When compared to other national or global vacation rental websites the GSMVRO renewal fee for the 2nd year is often ½ the competitors price. The price includes most of the competitions upgrades as a standard feature as well. The most significant difference is the GSMVRO website will send you a much more targeted audience that is specifically interested in Blue Ridge and Smokey Mountains area chalet/cabin rentals. The GSMVRO site has categories for virtually any type of rental. Examples include listings for Cheap Gatlinburg Cabin Rentals for the budget minded traveler and secluded Gatlinburg Cabins and chalets where privacy is of the utmost importance. And the GSMVRO site does not just cater to the frugal minded traveler by any means.

The site contains numerous listings for Gatlinburg Luxury Cabin Rentals that include indoor movie theaters, private indoor swimming pools as well as full size arcades for hours of entertainment the entire family will enjoy. This no cost offer enables property owners to display a “You Tube” video tour of the cabin listing to help gain the maximum exposure possible as well as 12 photos and 2 additional profile pictures which may also include a company logo. There are obvious benefits to this no cost offer – Why wait? Register Gatlinburg Cabin Rentals today on GSMVRO.

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Media Relations
Great Smoky Mountains Vacation Rentals Online
(865) 325-9559
Email Information

Photo by Casey Fox

Check the Files: Keith Langdon, left, manager of inventory and monitoring for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, examines a plant sample with Todd Witcher, executive director of Discover Life in America. Discover Life is the nonprofit agency leading the effort to identify all the species in the park.

Photo by Casey Fox

Life Library: Keith Langdon shows off some of the squirrels and moths stored in the national park’s climate-controlled specimen room.

You won’t see a tardigrade even if you step on one, or 100. The microscopic, eight-legged creatures are only about a half-millimeter long. Yet they are part of the most ambitious scientific endeavor in East Tennessee since the Manhattan Project.

Tardigrades live in wet places like mosses and beach sand. Because of their sectioned, steamer-trunk body and ambling gait, they are colloquially known as water bears or moss piglets. (Their name comes from tardigrada, Italian for “slow walker.”) But they are among the hardiest life forms on the planet. They depend on fluids for survival, which they extract from plant cells and smaller organisms by piercing the walls with tiny fang-like stylets and sucking out the contents with their tubular mouths. When there aren’t fluid sources around, they do something remarkable: They shut down their bodies in a process scientists call cryptobiosis. Curling up into a tiny ball, and filling their cells with a protective, synthesized sugar called trehalose, tardigrades can reduce their metabolic activity by about 99.99 percent. When they next encounter moisture, they can come back to life in just a few hours. Tardigrades have been resuscitated from dried moss that had been sitting in a museum for more than 100 years.

Just as dazzling as their endurance is their range. They have been found 20,000 feet up in the Himalayas, and 13,000 feet down in the ocean, in polar seas and equatorial dunes. And, not surprisingly, in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. With its abundance of mosses and lichens, and its 55 to 85 inches of rain a year (depending on elevation), the park is a tardigrade’s paradise. But if it is easy to assume a widespread and persistent tardigrade population, it has until recently been hard to know much about them. Unlike the park’s real bears, whose population is closely tracked, its little water bears went unstudied for decades.

“Before we started, there had only been one published record of tardigrades in the park, and there were three species,” says Paul Bartels, a biology professor at Warren Wilson College outside Asheville, N.C. “Now there are 78 species.”

The other 75, including 13 previously unknown to science, were identified through years of painstaking work by Bartels and about 50 of his students. How the intrepid undergrads came to be in the Smokies, gathering moss in a literal rather than metaphorical way, is a small part of a much larger story.

It is called the All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory, an overly technical title for a mind-boggling effort. Its significance starts to sink in if you know that Taxa means, basically, biological groups or families, flora or fauna. Any order of living thing. The All at the front end of the name means exactly what it says, as does Inventory. And the third word, Biodiversity, is really the key to the whole effort. The ATBI, now in its 14th year, is an attempt to count and catalog every species of anything living in the Great Smoky Mountains—and to understand how they relate to one another.

That includes the obvious ones everybody knows, the hemlocks and beeches and ash trees and firs, the deer and the trout and the synchronous fireflies. But it also includes the things the average person can’t see or doesn’t care about: the worms in the soil, the beetles in the leaf piles, the slugs and the snails, and all of the things that those things eat, or that eat them. It includes invasive species like the wooly adelgids that are killing acres of forest with their tree-weakening toxins. And it includes the endangered and the vanishing, like the Indiana bats, threatened by white-nose syndrome, and the furry spruce-fir moss spider, a victim of lost habitat as the park’s Fraser firs have fallen prey to pests.

“The problem that parks and natural areas have all over the world is that we only know a small fraction of the species that occur in each one,” says Keith Langdon, a Park Service biologist who is in charge of inventory and monitoring for the Smokies. “In places where we have a mandate to protect everything, we need to know what’s there.”

To date, the ATBI has racked up some impressive-sounding numbers: The number of known species in the park has nearly doubled, from 9,511 to 17,527, and research has so far identified 910 species new to science (including Bartels’ tardigrades). The count includes about 3,000 different kinds of beetle, alone. Langdon says that more than 1,000 scientists have been involved, either in field or lab work. And 19 sample plots scattered around the park’s 800 square miles have been plumbed in detail from the soil to the treetops. The Great Smoky Mountains is often touted as the most biodiverse national park in America, and its range of elevations and habitats is the reason. As one scientist says, you can study environments from Arkansas to Canada without leaving its boundaries.

But the work is far from finished, and it is getting harder. The funding that got the ATBI started has largely fallen off, and people to do the hands-on research are increasingly difficult to come by. It turns out that for all its scope, the kind of work the project demands is not, in a lot of ways, the kind of work that modern science most values and rewards.

“What happens when the hopeful, impossible task runs up against pragmatic reality?” Bartels says. “That’s the question.”

***

Photo by Casey Fox

The Monitor: Todd Witcher demonstrates a collection technique for sucking small bugs off the bark of a beech tree.

Photo by Casey Fox

A dangling trap collects passing insects for later study.

In a way, the ATBI seems like the ultimate realization of the classic scientific impulse to sort, categorize, and record the world. From Aristotle’s attempts to classify species (he came up with 540) to the Renaissance zoologist Conrad Gesner’s magisterial Histories of the Animals to the explosion of modern biology in the 19th century, there has been a persistent expansion and refinement of human understanding of the life around us. The ATBI, with its digital databases, its cabinets full of plants and animals, and its thousands and thousands of microscope slides, aims for a comprehensive account of one place on the map. An updatable, cross-referenced Book of Creation for the Great Smoky Mountains.

The old-fashioned ambition of the project presents some serious challenges, though. There are, first of all, the unforgiving terms of the mission: Count everything. The name says All, not Some or Most. There is the problem that the natural world does not stand still. Every count is a snapshot of this year, this organism, this place. One of the hopes for the ATBI is that it will make it easier to understand the effects of forces like climate change, air pollution, and invasive species. But those forces are already at work, which means that things already counted have to be monitored and revisited even as the search for new species goes on.

There is the constant question of financing. The project operates with a tiny staff and small pockets of grant money for visiting scientists. And there is that old-fashioned ambition itself. As biology has become increasingly a realm of molecules and genomes, there is less interest in merely observing and classifying.

“A lot of these people are dying off, not being replaced by new generations of authorities,” Langdon says.

Langdon looks like an old-fashioned scientist himself, his trim gray beard and handlebar mustache giving him the bearing of a gentleman about to address the Explorers’ Club. And the ATBI was his idea, or at least doing it here was. Alarmed by threats from assorted invasive species in the 1990s, he reckoned that the only way to measure their impact on local flora and fauna was to first know everything that was out there.

“We found out about a project in Costa Rica that was trying to do that and failed,” he says, sitting in the park’s Twin Creeks Science and Education Center. Behind him, big windows look out on a wooded hill, the trees bright with October color. “So this is the second attempt.”

That first project was spearheaded by Daniel Janzen, a prominent ecologist at the University of Pennsylvania. Janzen, who specializes in butterflies and moths, has spent much of his professional life working in Costa Rica’s Area de Conservación Guanacaste, a national park in the country’s northwest corner. Reached by phone at his university office, after just returning from Central America, Janzen says the ATBI concept came out of a 1993 meeting of scientists in Philadelphia. They were wrestling with the question of how to figure out what actually lived in large, protected areas—not just out of their own professional curiosity, but as a public service.

“In order to make them be, shall we say, user-friendly for society,” Janzen says, “so that society can go to them and use them and make use of what’s in them, we need to know what’s in them. It’s just like a library. If a library’s got a huge number of books, but nobody knows what they are or where they are, what good is a library? It’s just firewood.”

That 1993 meeting proposed a model that became the first ATBI effort, led by Janzen and some colleagues (including his wife and collaborator, Winnie Hallwachs) in Guanacaste. But after rounding up $ 25 million from government science funds around the world to start the research, they saw the money reappropriated for other conservation efforts after a new administration came to power in Costa Rica. “The lesson we learned was that, if you’re going to do something like this, you need to raise the money in some way that is not controlled by the political process,” Janzen says.

Langdon, who flew down to Costa Rica to meet Janzen a few years later, kept that lesson in mind. When he called together 120 scientists and educators in Gatlinburg in 1997 to talk about starting an ATBI in the park, the first result was the creation of a separate, nonprofit organization to manage the project. Discover Life in America was formed in 1998, with start-up funding largely from the park and its affiliated nonprofits, the Great Smoky Mountain Association and Friends of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It is a small operation with just two full-time staffers: a data manager, who organizes and categorizes the massive amounts of information collected by researchers since work started in earnest in 2000, and an executive director. The latter position has been filled for the last four years by Todd Witcher, a robust, bearded outdoorsman who previously taught high school biology and was an educator at Ijams Nature Center. His office is a small house behind the science center, crammed with file folders, maps, reference books, and the accoutrements of field work.

“I basically write grants and deal with the scientists and try to raise money and work with the park,” Witcher says. His job includes everything from trying to find someone with a boat to take visiting researchers across Fontana Lake to hosting monthly “sorting events,” where volunteers come in and help organize specimen samples into groups for later study.

For several years, with budgets between $ 200,000 and $ 300,000, Discover Life provided mini-grants to bring in specialists in particular areas for a few days or weeks of research. That’s fallen off recently as the park has directed money to more pressing needs: “Trails falling down the mountain, hemlocks, getting water quality data,” Langdon offers as examples. So Witcher is looking for new sources to keep the inventory going.

“We’re still in the throes of figuring that out,” he says. “Where our best funding sources are, how to survive hardships like we’re going through right now.” He’s hoping for a bump in local and national recognition next March, when the renowned biologist E.O. Wilson comes to deliver the keynote address at Discover Life’s annual conference.

***

Photo by Casey Fox

Photo by Casey Fox

Life Library: Keith Langdon shows off some of the squirrels and moths stored in the national park’s climate-controlled specimen room.

“So this is the park,” Nate Sanders says, pointing to a computer screen in his lab at the University of Tennessee’s Knoxville campus. “And the redder colors show you where there are more individuals of this species. Like here, for the hairy woodpecker, it’s most common on these high elevations and ridgetops. But then the downy woodpecker is most common in Cades Cove.”

The screen shows dozens of tiny maps of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, with the park’s familiar topography in blue, spattered by blobs of red and yellow. Each map documents one species of bird or tree. “And so one of the things we’re working on doing is essentially stacking all of these maps up,” Sanders says. “So then you can say, where white ash occurs, is that also where the indigo bunting occurs?” (The indigo bunting is a small, migratory bird, with males of the vivid color indicated by the name.) “And are the places that have lots of different trees the same places that have lots of different birds?”

The maps were compiled by a UT post-doctoral student, and they’re just one of many projects Sanders and his students have undertaken as part of the ATBI. Sanders is an ecologist who specializes in biodiversity, and when he arrived at UT in 2004 from Humboldt State in California, one of the first things he did was get in touch with Discover Life in America. “At the time it was the only thing like it in the world,” he says. “It was a great opportunity.”

Sanders is doing what you might call second-level ATBI work: Taking some of the data already collected on those 17,527 species and trying to understand what it means. “What we’ve done is try to figure out why species are where they are,” he says. “One of the things we focused on early on is, how does temperature relate to biodiversity?” Warmer places tend to have more species than colder places. So what, Sanders asks, are the implications of climate change for any particular location? If, for example, new species start to move into an area because it is now warmer than before, what will that mean for the species already there?

“One pretty cool example is that most of the plant species that you see in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park rely on ants to disperse their seeds,” Sanders says. “So one of the things we did was just put out seeds and look at what happened to them. And 166 out of 167 times, one ant species carried the seed away. So even though there there’s a lot of biodiversity in the Smokies, there’s some species that do a lot.” If one of those super-species was threatened by changes in its habitat, it could have wide-ranging consequences.

About a 10-minute walk from Sanders’ lab is Ernest Bernard’s office in the Plant Biotechnology Building, on UT’s Agriculture Campus. As the drawings of hairy bugs on a drafting table by his desk indicate, Bernard specializes in small, scrabbling things. He has been involved with the ATBI since the kick-off meeting in 1998, and served eight years on the Discover Life board of directors (he was board chair for three of those years).

“When we find increasing biodiversity, it means we have increasing links between all of these species,” Bernard says. “The web of life out there is much more complicated. Every species you add in, you add in another set of interactions with everything else.”

At the ground level, he has concentrated on some of the park’s least-visible inhabitants: tiny, six-legged creatures called springtails that are insect-like but not technically insects; nematodes, better known as roundworms; and protura, eyeless, wingless crawlers less than 2 millimeters long.

“We know a lot about the big, conspicuous species,” Bernard says. “We know very little about the small, inconspicuous ones. And yet these species probably have, as a whole, important functions in the maintenance of healthy ecosystems.”

The scrutiny has yielded plenty of discoveries. In springtails alone, Bernard has more than quadrupled the number of species identified in the park, to 240, and 60 of those were previously unrecorded anywhere.

“This project always surprises me,” he says. “Once we started looking closely at some less disturbed areas of the park, we began finding species of soil insects whose closest relatives are in South America. From some grasslands down near the southern end of the park, near Cherokee, we had a springtail that its closest relatives are in Europe.”

The scientists involved in the early ATBI meetings made a back-of-the-napkin guess that the park might have 100,000 species. But 11-plus years of work haven’t pushed the total to anywhere close to that. “That 100,000 figure has stuck with us and haunted us,” Langdon says. “But there’s no scientific basis for that. We’re at 17,000. So if it was 100,000 and we went out and collected 10 species at random, you’d think eight of them would be new to the park. That’s not what the way it is. So I think it’s a lot less than that. On the other hand, there are some groups that we haven’t even scratched yet.”

The ATBI has made some progress by recruiting volunteers. That’s how Bartels got involved. A retired professor at East Tennessee State University had agreed to look at tardigrade samples from the park, if someone else would collect and sort them. Bartels had read about the ATBI and thought it would be a good project for his students. When he called to volunteer, he was assigned tardigrades. Over 10 years, his students have collected 15,000 specimens.

“We’ve developed a key to all the tardigrades in the Smokies that’s an online, easy to use key,” Bartels says. “So anybody that wants to go in now and do ecological work or assessments of whatever impacts they’re interested in, now has a tool that they can use and do that. They don’t have to start from scratch.”

Thirteen of his students have done their senior research projects on aspects of the project, and a few have been inspired to do graduate work in the same area. It is just the kind of outreach Janzen envisioned as part of the ATBI concept, a way to open up science and nature to anyone. Bartels says, “It’s really exciting for students to realize that we don’t know everything, we’re really ignorant, and that there’s a lot to be discovered.”

***

Todd Witcher is standing in a hillside forest high up in the Smokies, off a trail between Newfound Gap and Clingman’s Dome. All around him are the smooth, gray barks of beech trees. This is a beech gap, interrupting the march of fir trees above 5,000 feet, one of several such islands scattered through the park. They tend to occur in dips on south-facing slopes, and because they are isolated from each other they provide readymade study sites.

Specifically, the park is concerned about the spread of beech bark disease, a one-two punch delivered by an insect (the beech scale, which bores into the trees) and a fungus (which invades the holes left by the scale). This particular gap is so far free of the disease, which is why it’s one of three being rigorously studied in the ATBI.

“One of the urgencies is before infestation, to have a baseline of what’s supposed to be here, and what could be lost,” Witcher says. Trained volunteers come up here in spring, summer, and fall to collect samples of insects on the bark and anything in the surrounding leaf litter of eight designated beech trees (and eight non-beech “control” trees).

The study hints at the long-term goals of the ATBI. Even if a truly complete inventory was completed, the threats to the park’s many ecosystems would mandate continual revisits and resampling.

“In the inventory, we’re finding out what’s there,” Bernard says. “But equally important then is monitoring. Being able to go back and check and see if changes have occurred.”

But that will require ongoing resources. Witcher says Discover Life’s board, originally heavily populated by scientists, is diversifying to focus more on fund-raising. Some participants are getting creative; in one program, scientists are offering to name some of the abundant new species after generous donors. (Bernard has already led the way, naming a new springtail with a purplish, spotted back for the Tennessee senator who helped secure some federal financing for the project. As of 2006, the park is home to Cosberella lamaralexanderi.)

All the challenges notwithstanding, Janzen says he hopes more parks around the United States and the world undertake ATBIs in coming years. “China talked about doing a project, but I don’t know if any ever happened,” he says. “Sweden is basically doing an ATBI of the whole country. Aside from that, I can’t name another place that has taken on the whole thing seriously.”

One thing working in the concept’s favor is technology. The computing power necessary to sort and store all the data is much cheaper and more accessible than it was when Janzen first tried to plan an inventory. There’s also the potential to equip future volunteers and scientists with instant identification tools. “Everybody walks around with a cell-phone camera now,” Janzen says. “Today it’s much easier to turn a person into being a biodiversity inventory person, just with the tools they have in their pockets.”

However the ATBI continues, scientists involved in it share a conviction that its continuation is crucial—to understanding what is in the Great Smoky Mountains, and where and why, but by extension also to understanding more about life everywhere on the planet.

“One of the big questions is, if you understand one thing, do you understand many other things?” Sanders says. “Everyone who’s worked there has worked on their favorite group of organisms. Now that I think that I understand something about the ants, does what I’ve learned there apply at all to the lichens? I don’t really know yet.”

He adds, “I think it’s just been an incredible test bed to understand the diversity of life on earth.”

© 2011 MetroPulse. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Mass Audubon’s Ipswich River Wildlife Sanctuary in Topsfield presents Discovering Life in America on Thursday, Nov/ 17 from 7:30-9 p.m., a PowerPoint presentation and discussion by Kevin Fitz Patrick, a photographer for the Discover Life in America/Great Smoky Mountains National Park All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory Project, and Marc Albert, Stewardship Program Manager at the Boston Harbor Islands National Park Area in Boston.

Join the Sanctuary for an intriguing look into a big-idea project that seeks to document all living species in a given area in order to better understand the ecosystem and how to protect it. Known as the All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory (ATBI) Project, it started in Great Smoky Mountains National Park and now has spread throughout the country from Yellowstone, to Big Thicket Preserve in Texas, to Acadia National Park. Kevin has been involved in the project at Great Smoky Mountains National Park since its inception as its photographic coordinator, and is involved in many of the other ATBI projects around the country.

In his PowerPoint presentation, he will show some of the amazing discoveries that have been made, talk about the citizen science and educational opportunities the project provides, and discuss how to set up an ATBI in your area. He will also include some amazing photos from a recent beetle bio blitz in Acadia and a National Geographic bio blitz in Tucson. Marc will discuss the ATBI project at the Boston Harbor Islands National Park, and how you can get involved in it.

To learn more about ATBI and ongoing projects, visit the ATBI website, atbialliance.org or the Discover Life in America website, dlia.org. The program is free to Mass Audubon members, $ 5 nonmembers. Meets in the Ipswich River Wildlife Sanctuary Barn (87 Perkins Row, Topsfield). For more information or to register, call 978-887-9264.