A Conversation With the Smokies’ Species-Finder

For the past 11 years, Todd Witcher has been the executive director of Discover Life in America, a nonprofit whose main project, the All Taxa Biodiversity Index, is dedicated to cataloguing every single species within the Great Smoky Mountains National Park’s 816-square-mile boundary. It’s a big job, because the Smokies is one of the world’s most biodiverse regions. In the 21 years of DLIA’s existence, it has documented 20,050 species in the park, of which 9,564 had never been found there before and 1,006 were new to science. 

When you came on as executive director, how many species had been documented and what were the main challenges the effort faced? 

We were at maybe 800 species, 700 and something. The challenge was funding and raising awareness of the project. Those are really sort of tied together. If people know about what you are doing and you can convince them it’s important, they’ll support you. 

DLIA has marked some important milestones in the past year or so, reaching 20,000 species documented in the park and 1,000 new to science. What goes on behind the scenes to rack up those numbers? 

We don’t just research whatever we want to research. We have a priority list from the park, and then we go out and help find and fund scientists in those priority groups to come and do the research. Then of course to get a new species, sometimes that’s a long process. A simplified version would be, we might give a grant to a scientist who’s going to work on a priority group, and they make plans to come to the park. Depending on where they are, that timeframe might drag out some. Then there’s an identification process. Some of the obscure species are harder to identify than, say, a mammal. And then as far as it being a new species, there has to be a peer review process, which sometimes can take up to five years of going through the natural history and documentation of the specimen and photographs and all of that, just to be sure that it is a new species. 

What have been some of the most exciting finds thus far? 

Oh, gosh, I don’t really have a good answer for that. I like it all, of course. We have a new crayfish species, which being a kid playing with crayfish growing up, that is exciting. The giant earthworm is certainly fascinating—an 18-inch earthworm that is found along the Appalachian Trail. There are so many stories not even related to “new to science.” For example, we found a new blueberry species in the park. It’s not new to science, but the other populations of this species are in Canada, so it’s a disjunct population. 

These species exist regardless of whether we know that they’re there, so why is it important to document them?

It’s hard to protect something if you don’t know about it. The more we know about who’s here, the more we know about what their role is in the ecology of the park, the more we know about where they are in the park, the more we know about how many of them are in the park—are they rare or are they common?—the better we can design efforts to conserve them. In a general sense, that’s my thought on why this is important, but we know that all of our human medicines come from nature, so we don’t know what our next discovery might mean as far as a new medicine or a cure for something, or a new food. 

What does the future hold for the project? Will the work ever be done? 

There will come a time when we decide that the amount of effort needed to find the few remaining estimated species wouldn’t be worth the time and effort and finances. We’re not to that point. We’re a little over 20,000. A good estimate right now is there’s about 60,000 species in the park, so we have a lot more work to do. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.