A Conversation With the Smokies’ Species Hunter

Since 2018, Will Kuhn has served as director of science and research for Discover Life in America, a nonprofit partner of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Through DLiA’s flagship project, the All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory, he seeks to catalogue every unique species in the Smokies. Since it started in 1998, the ATBI has catalogued more than 21,000 species, of which more than 10,000 had never been found in the park before and more than 1,000 were completely new to science.

How did you get involved with DLiA?

In 2012 there was an entomology conference at the Knoxville Conference Center and Todd Witcher (DLIA director) had a booth there talking about Discover Life in America and the ATBI. I met him and thought, ‘What a cool project.’ At the time I was doing my Ph.D. in New Jersey, so I thought, ‘I’ll never live close enough to work on that.’ I’ve always heard about the biodiversity crisis, that so many species are going extinct, and there’s still so many species yet to be discovered. This seemed like a project we really should be doing everywhere, not just in the Smokies.

What does a day on the job look like for you?

It varies quite a bit from day to day and week to week. I do a lot of office work, working with our volunteers to pin insects and start to ID them. Working with researchers, sending insect specimens out to specialists so they can identify, doing lots of public outreach, talking about the importance of biodiversity. And then during the summer we’re out in the field a lot. We have three interns every summer, and they help us with field research, going out and collecting insects and helping other researchers that are in the Smokies work on their specific projects. Helping the park with various inventory and monitoring-related projects, and just kind of roaming the Smokies looking for new and undiscovered species. It really varies and it’s fun, the variety of stuff I get to do.

The ATBI has so far documented more than 21,000 species in the park. That’s a lot of species — do you believe there are still more to find?

We estimate there are 60,000 to 80,000 species, so we still have a long ways to go. That number is just an estimate based on some statistics and polling taxonomists. But we actually have a researcher named Moria Robinson who is doing some statistical analysis on existing ATBI data to hone down that number, to give us a better idea of how many species could be estimated to be living in the park, and also to highlight some understudied groups where there’s likely to be lots of additional species to be found. We definitely think there’s a lot more species to be discovered. We’re making new discoveries every week.

In addition to collaborating with professional scientists, the ATBI enlists everyday people to help document Smokies species. How does that work?

There’s a couple of sides to that. One is that we have some volunteers that come to our office and help us inspect insect specimens, pin them, mount them and label them, which is all tedious, time-consuming work. Then they help us to roughly identify those, and we send out batches of specific insect groups to certain specialists for species ID. We are also really pushing a community science project called Smokies Most Wanted. This is a way that anyone visiting the park can help gather scientific data about species that they see using this app called iNaturalist. They can take photos or record sounds of a species that they see or hear and report back to iNaturalist. Every new observation tells us where and when the species was recorded. Other folks will help us identify that species, and we’re able to use that data to learn more about species that we already know are in the Smokies and even to discover new species. Since last year, we have found 83 new species records for the park, just using iNaturalist.