The Great Smoky Mountains National Park has become an international source of envy for biosphere preserves and national parks that want to emulate the Smokies’ All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory.

The Smokies launched a massive undertaking eight years ago to tally every living organism in the park. Exactly how massive an undertaking the project would be is just now becoming clear. To date, 543 species new to science and 3,358 species new to the park have been found. At this time, less than 15 percent of the species estimated to dwell in the park have been identified and studied. Researchers are still finding new species on plots of land that had been combed over one or two times already.

“Its purpose is to comprehensively inventory — to take stock of — the biological wealth of species in a defined area,” said Keith Langdon, the head of inventory and monitoring in the Park. “Prompting this idea are the alarming data that show a worldwide, unnatural acceleration of losses of populations of species and even entire species.”

The concept of an ATBI was originally conceived at the University of Pennsylvania by Dan Janzen and other American and European scientists. The first attempt at this sort of project was in Costa Rica in association with researchers in that country. Due to disagreements over direction of the project and funding, that attempt was abandoned in 1996, according to Langdon.

The Great Smoky Mountains National Park and its many partners modified the concept in minor ways so that it better addressed the full slate of issues facing the park — stewardship, science, and education. After an initial series of meetings with scientists, educators, long-term partners, and staff, the National Park Service sanctioned the Smokies project on Earth Day in 1998. For several years, most efforts have been focused on how best to conduct and complete such a large project, Langdon said.

“Much has been learned and accomplished as the Smokies partners have pushed the envelope on conducting this type of biodiversity project,” Langdon said.

But recently other parks and reserves have become interested in starting inventories of their species. About a dozen reserves are seriously considering, planning or conducting biodiversity inventories. These include not only National Park Service units in various parts of the U.S., but also places such as Nantucket Island, which is owned in part by The Nature Conservancy, and the 6-million acre Adirondack State Forest Preserve in upstate New York. The latest efforts are with the Tennessee State Park system, which has 15 parks across the state that are planning or have already begun ATBI’s.

Discover Life in America, the Smokies’ principal non-profit partner in conducting its ATBI, has assisted in planning the state parks’ effort, as have Smokies park staff. However, there are some concerns associated with expansion of ATBI’s in other areas across the country.

“Will the services of the few taxonomic authorities be stretched too thin? And, can data be collected in a standard manner, to facilitate comparisons of biodiversity across regions?” Langdon said of the some of the concerns floating around the ATBI world.

These questions and other are being discussed among participating ATBI’s, he said.