GRSM ATBI PLOTS

The Smokies ATBI, a project of Discover Life in America, seeks to catalog the estimated 60,000-80,000 species of living organisms in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. A brainchild of renowned ecologist Dan Janzen, the first ATBI was supposed to take place in the rainforests of northwest Costa Rica. Due to bureaucratic difficulties, however, the location was changed to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The idea behind an All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory (ATBI) is simple. If we want to be good stewards of our environment and keep the world around us healthy and vibrant, we need to understand the web of biodiversity. The information we need—how many species live in an environment, what jobs these species do and how they interact with each other—is largely unknown. Although most explanations of an ATBI stress that it is an effort to identify all the species of life in a given area, that is not its only goal. An ATBI is more than just a checklist of species names. It is a complex and living database of species locations, habitats, genetic diversity, population density, symbiotic relationships and predator-prey interactions. It is a cooperative effort between expert scientists specializing in all different forms of life. It is a way to discover new species in need of protection, identify new threats in time to act and understand how to protect a complex and valuable ecosystem like the Smoky Mountains. The corresponding Integration of Resource Management Applications (IRMA) NPS Data Store reference is Great Smoky Mountains National Park All Taxa Biodiversity Index Plots.