Word from the Smokies: Discover Life in America marks milestone in species inventory project
A close-up of a golden sweat bee found at Shaw Grave Gap shows every detail of the insect’s face.
Photo by Doug Bruce.
Mindy Fawver is retired from a career in commercial photography and graphic design, while her husband, Doug Bruce, works as an industrial alignment engineer; neither has a professional background in biology, conservation, or taxonomy. But together, the couple has documented more than 60 species in Great Smoky Mountains National Park never before recorded there.
“We go almost every weekend when the weather’s good,” said Bruce, who lives with his wife near Oliver Springs, Tennessee. “We try to choose areas that aren’t very well documented already.”
Fawver and Bruce aren’t the only non-scientists to have made significant contributions to the growing body of knowledge about species living in the Smokies via the community science app iNaturalist. In February, park partner Discover Life in America celebrated the 200,000th iNaturalist observation to be added to the Smokies All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory project, which aims to catalogue each individual species residing in the park. Since the ATBI began in 1998, 22,143 different species have been recorded in the Smokies, and iNaturalist users—who include scientists and park staff but also visitors, volunteers, and even children — have logged 6,939 of them in the app. These include 280 species that had not been seen inside the park before an iNaturalist user observed them.
“Every time we go out, we’ll find things we’ve never seen before—it never gets boring,” Fawver said. “Especially with the very small insects, most people don’t ever see or notice them, so you’re showing them a whole other world.”
Though the park’s larger lifeforms are already quite well documented, the smaller creatures — flies, wasps, beetles, moths and the like — are more difficult to spot and identify. Bruce and Fawver concentrate their efforts on these easily overlooked animals, choosing one group of species to focus on each time they go to the park.
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Their current subjects are leafhoppers, tiny yet incredibly colorful flying insects. Some are as small as three millimeters, a speck to the naked eye, so Fawver and Bruce come equipped with macro lenses on their DSLR cameras and kneepads to kneel on as they crawl around, eyes trained on the ground. Each trip yields hundreds of photos to be processed once they return home. For every observation uploaded to iNaturalist, they manually tag the location, enter any relevant notes, and identify the species as closely as possible. Then, experts using the app can verify the identification or ask any clarifying questions.
iNaturalist first launched in March 2008, and though some early users logged observations in the Smokies shortly thereafter, DLiA didn’t start promoting it in earnest until 2019, when the organization established the precursor to its Smokies Most Wanted initiative. Smokies Most Wanted is a list of 100 species — some native, some invasive — for which more information is needed to aid park management decisions. Though DLiA encourages park visitors to log observations of any lifeform they see while in the park, sightings of these particular species are especially coveted.
“We were excited about the possibilities of park visitors using iNaturalist and being extra pairs of eyes around the park,” said Will Kuhn, director of science and research for DLiA. “Since then, it has blossomed into this really neat dataset that represents all kinds of very common species but also some less common species.”
Currently, the most-observed species in the Smokies ATBI project on iNaturalist are common yet delightful finds such as the pipevine swallowtail butterfly, great rhododendron (also known as rosebay rhododendron), mountain doghobble, and yellow wakerobin trillium. More unusual sightings make up the most-favorited observations in the project — a vibrant Blackburnian warbler perched in a birch tree at Newfound Gap, a timber rattlesnake in the act of eating a chipmunk near Townsend, a gleaming saffron shiner fish found in the West Prong of the Little Pigeon River near Gatlinburg. Anyone can view these photos online, and creating a free account allows users to join the conversation and contribute their own observations and identifications.
“In a lot of the photos that are posted to iNaturalist, the subject will be interacting with something else,” Kuhn said. “There are a ton of pictures of bugs on flowers or maybe pollinating flowers, for example. The data from iNaturalist is not only helping us to know what species are in the park, where they are in the park, and when they’re active, but also what their associations are with other species.”
This data, in turn, helps to build a bigger picture of how the park’s myriad ecosystems function, giving the National Park Service valuable insight into how to better protect the plants and animals they contain. Using data from the app, NPS can see where sensitive species are located and better understand where harmful invasive species occur.
Even someone who has never used iNaturalist before and has no experience with species identification can contribute. Photos can be taken inside the app or uploaded from elsewhere, and an AI algorithm uses the image and location data to generate a list of potential identifications. Observations are categorized as “research grade” only after multiple people have agreed on an identification, so novice users need not worry about being wrong — others can review their observation later to confirm or revise the ID.
“Some people will say, ‘I don’t even know what to observe,’” said Jaimie Matzko, director of communications and outreach for DLiA. “If nothing else, fruits, flowers, birds during migration, caterpillars, things that are signifying seasonal changes are super valuable.”
These seasonal markers contribute to a better understanding of phenology, the study of seasonal timing and cyclical patterns in the natural world. Phenological events can help reveal how changes in climate or elevation gradient impact the plants and animals living there.
Such insights are as much a part of DLiA’s mission as the “inventory” component of the ATBI. Matzko compared the process to exchanging names after meeting someone new. A person’s name is often the first thing you learn about them, but the name alone doesn’t say much about who that individual is and how they relate to the world.
“The inventory part is the first step in getting to know life in the park, and the next step is asking questions,” Matzko said. “In science, that’s how you learn things — by asking questions and trying to figure out those more unique things about these species that we have found and documented.”
DLiA expects future iNaturalist records to play an important role in improving scientific understanding of these connections and hopes to increase the pace of new observations. The park receives more than 12 million visits each year; if even a small percentage of visitors logged an iNaturalist observation during their trip, the dataset would expand rapidly.
Matzko said that inspiring kids to get involved and teaching them how to use iNaturalist is an important part of the effort’s future. Through its iScience program, DLiA conducts regular biodiversity programs at schools across the Tennessee Valley Authority region in East Tennessee, and iNaturalist is part of the curriculum. The organization also plans to continue working with the National Park Service to educate visitors about how they can get involved.
“It’s something that I think anyone can use and anyone can participate in,” she said. “It’s just finding a way that works for them. They might not know if the data is valuable or not, but it might turn out to be something that is really important. And even if it doesn’t, they’ve learned something about the park, and that in and of itself is part of our goal.”
Holly Kays is the lead writer for the 29,000-member Smokies Life, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting the scientific, historical, and interpretive activities of Great Smoky Mountains National Park by providing educational products and services such as this column. Learn more at SmokiesLife.org or reach the author at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. To learn more about Smokies Most Wanted and get started with iNaturalist, visit DLiA.org/SmokiesMostWanted. The app is available free for Android and iPhone users.
