GRISLD Group Fuels Smokies Biodiversity Tracking
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- GRISLD volunteers, including James Hollinger and Laura Boggess, trek into remote spruce‑fir forests of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park to catalog obscure lichens, mosses and salamanders.
- James Hollinger identified a rare spongy lichen on a yellow birch that has been recorded only about a dozen times in the park and suggested naming it on the spot.
- All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory (ATBI), a partnership between the park and the nonprofit Discover Life in America, incorporates data from GRISLD’s surveys to maintain one of the nation’s longest‑running species inventories.
- Discover Life in America manages the ATBI and relies on volunteer observations to track biodiversity across the park’s varied elevations and microclimates.
- Climate change is driving invasive insects, tree die‑off and more frequent floods, fires and storms in the Smokies, heightening the urgency of the inventory’s monitoring efforts.
Why it matters: Park managers gain real‑time species data to detect climate‑driven changes, while funding cuts threaten long‑term monitoring, potentially allowing invasive species and forest loss to go unchecked.
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