Putting Diversity on the Map

The Great Smoky Mountains National Park occupies some of the most biologically diverse forest on the globe, and the recently competed Species Mapper offers the opportunity to explore that diversity from a computer screen. 

The Species Mapper is an online database featuring a drop-down menu of more than 1,800 park species. Pick one, and an interactive map appears, showing where that species is likely to be found in the park. 

“Prior to us building out this application, we were saying that the park has one of the greatest biodiversity footprints, but there was no way to convince the public of that,” says Tom Colson, the architect of the project, which came into being thanks to some $50,000 from the park budget as well as a partnership with the University of Tennessee’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and its School of Arts. 

Tom Remaley, the park’s inventory and monitoring program manager, says they also hope to integrate the tool into interpretation programs in order to further educate youth on the myriad of species that live in the park.

That’s not to say the project is complete. In fact, Remaley and Colson are already embarking on phase two. They’re working to enhance the mapper’s ability, perhaps creating a smartphone app, as well as creating species groupings such as fall wildflowers or butterflies. 

Over time, the Species Mapper will also include more species in its drop-down menu. The 1,500 currently displayed represent just a small subset of the more than 19,000 species that have been documented inside the park. Some of them were left out for good reason. 

“There are species that if you release the information, there’s a possibility of harm coming to that species or the habitat that species lives in,” Remaley says. “Ginseng is very valuable. If you do a distribution map, you’re basically helping out the poachers.”

Some species need clarification of the data points. For example, if data on black bears were fed straight into the computer with no curation, the map would show that black bears prefer campgrounds as their habitat. That’s not really true, but many black bear sightings occur in campgrounds when bears become artificially habituated to human food. For most species, however, the team just needs more time to crunch the data into the Species Mapper.

The Species Mapper is available at science.nature.nps.gov/ parks/grsm/species.