Smokies lead effort to catalog park life

[Thom Little]

The ambitious All-Taxa Biodiversity Inventory project, which aims to catalog every life form in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, has already found 3,500 species new to the park and more than 500 previously unknown to scientists.

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.




http://www.commercialappeal.com/mca/midsouth_news/article/0,1426,MCA_1497_4298119,00.html