Illinois Natural History Survey - University of Illinois
INRS State Scientific Surveys
INHS Reports Summer 2001
INHS Inventories Smoky Mountains Flora
If you are ever hiking the trails down at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GSMNP), you may stumble across a rag-tag group of botanists from the Illinois Natural History Survey (INHS). Now why would a group of botanists from Illinois be collecting plants down there among the Appalachian Mountains? Because they would be participating in the largest All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory (ATBI) ever to be undertaken on our planet--the All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
The goal of an ATBI is to discover and document all the species that occur in a
specific area. The idea is that if you know what lives in an area, you will be
able to make better decisions concerning the management of the area and monitor
changes over time. The GSMNP was chosen as a site for an ATBI because of the
rich and diverse collection of plants and animals that occur there, and because
of its topography, climate, and size. The park encompasses over half a million
acres that include large tracts of old growth and contiguous forests. It has
been designated as an International Biosphere Reserve.
The ATBI was begun in the park in 1999 with a deadline of 10-15 years. During this time, the goal of the organizers is to have a comprehensive checklist of all life forms in the park, range maps for each park species, and natural history information for each species. They would also like to have this information organized and available to scientists, educators, land managers, and anyone else who might find it useful via the World Wide Web and other media.
Because the National Park Service could not hope to complete this grand-scale
project on its own within the given time frame, it has called on many partners
from universities and colleges, museums, other government agencies, and
volunteers to help. The University of Tennessee in Knoxville (UT) was one of
the first to get involved. Rick Phillippe, a botanist at the INHS, had done
his doctoral work at UT and still had ties to the Botany Department there.
When he heard of the ATBI he immediately wanted to become involved. Not only
had Rick done his doctoral work in Tennessee, but he also had been going to the
park every year for almost 20 years to lead wildflower hikes for the Smoky
Mountains Wildflower Pilgrimage. He was very familiar with the flora of the
Smoky Mountains and was the perfect candidate to help with the inventory.
That first year (1999) Rick didn't have too much trouble convincing a couple of fellow botanists to go along. Hiking, camping, and collecting plants in the Appalachian Mountains sounded like a good time to Rick Larimore and myself. Little did we know what lay ahead! Walking the flat lands of central Illinois did little to prepare us for the steep, arduous slopes of the mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina. And we hadn't realized what a single-minded collecting machine Rick Phillippe was. It was hiking from dawn to dusk, up and down the sides of the mountains, both on trail and off-trail, through rhododendron thickets and patches of plants aptly called dog hobble and witch hobble! Despite the experience being a whole lot more like work and less like a stroll in the woods then we expected, the beauty and richness of the place had us hooked.
The first year we collected 284 vascular plants and 70 lichens including a federally endangered lichen. Word of our exploits spread and more INHS botanists wanted to get involved. Dan Busemeyer, Connie Carroll, and Brenda Molano-Flores began participating in 2000 and Greg Spyreas came along for the first trip in 2001. In the year 2000, we collected 717 vascular plants and 43 lichens including 9 rare plants. In 2001, with just one trip thus far, we have collected over 200 vascular plants including 11 plants rare to the park. These include Disporum maculatum (nodding mandarin), Trillium cuneatum (bloody butcher), Hexastylis shuttleworthii (large-flowered heartleaf), and Rick Phillippe's personal favorite, Sanicula smallii (southern sanicle)! Many of these rare plants were not known from the locations where we collected them.
Although the vascular plants are fairly well known for the park in terms of a checklist, the distribution and abundance of many plants is not known. To help with this, we focus on a specific watershed and collect everything we can within it. We always try to collect two specimens of each species. One of these goes to the GSMNP collection at UT and one is deposited into our herbarium at INHS. These specimens are valuable for our herbarium. As it turns out, many species rare in Illinois are much more common in the Smoky Mountains. If not for our collections made in the park, we might have only a few or no specimens of these species in our herbarium. Examples of such plants include Euonymous americanus (American strawberry bush), Chimaphila maculata (spotted wintergreen), Gaultheria procumbens (wintergreen), Polygonatum pubescens (downy Solomon's seal), and Carex nigromarginata (black-edged sedge), which are Illinois state endangered species, and Carex prasina (drooping sedge), which is an Illinois state threatened species.
The ATBI of the GSMNP is a long-term project and we hope to continue our participation for several more years. This project is important because of the information it will provide and because a scientific survey of this scale has never been undertaken before. It will serve as a model for future projects in other parks and protected areas, perhaps someday in the state of Illinois.
Mary Ann Feist, Center for Wildlife Ecology
Charlie Warwick, editor