JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Scientists are tracking all kinds of living things in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park on the border of Tennessee and North Carolina. Many are volunteers, and their work has become important in documenting changes in its rich biodiversity. As part of our series Here to Help, Katie Myers with Grist and Blue Ridge Public Radio reports.
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KATIE MYERS, BYLINE: A gentle rain is falling as four people in raincoats make their way deep into the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. They duck under the bright green underbrush, stepping away from the road towards a high mountain spruce forest. A hush takes over. Just a few steps in, they see something exciting.
JASON HOLLINGER: So it's all up and down the side of this one tree.
MYERS: It looks like a regular mossy tree, but to this crew, it's a whole world of life. Jason Hollinger (ph) and Laura Boggess, two of the volunteers, take out a small magnifying lens.
LAURA BOGGESS: Yes, right here. See how they kind of, like...
HOLLINGER: Oh, yeah.
BOGGESS: ...Give a little swoop.
HOLLINGER: I see the swoop.
MYERS: They see a spongy little lichen, a combination of fungus and algae that grows really slowly. This one is so rare, it hasn't really been documented in the park.
HOLLINGER: So we could, right here, right now, come up with a common name for it.
MYERS: Hollinger and the others call themselves the Gang of Retirees in Search of Life's Diversity or GRISLD. This group is held together by a listserv and their own keen interest in getting to the park's hard-to-reach spots. They quietly contribute to a unique project, the all taxa biodiversity inventory, managed by the nonprofit Discover Life in America. That means they're out documenting every single species they can find.
HOLLINGER: We'll hike into these places that other researchers don't have the resources, the funding to do. And we're all retired, so we can do that.
MYERS: Hollinger didn't start out peering through a magnifying glass.
HOLLINGER: Ex computer scientist in the .com boom - I was able to retire early.
MYERS: When he retired, he became, as he says, an amateur lichenologist. He just thought their diverse and colorful ecosystems were really cool. He started looking for them all over the country, from Nevada to the Smokies.
HOLLINGER: So I was choosing places that nobody could get funding to collect because, yes, lichens are useless commercially.
MYERS: They're an important part of the food chain. From squirrels to insects, they're part of their diet. Lichen are also very sensitive to pollution, so if they die, other species may be in trouble, too. Besides lichen, volunteers have documented thousands of species, including rare salamanders, flowers and bugs. As a volunteer, you can contribute to the body of scientific knowledge, says Laura Boggess, who is a climber and ecologist. All it takes is being observant.
BOGGESS: The small ways, the paying attention, the naming a species, which isn't a small thing, but it's, like, an accumulation of small, like, cooperative creation.
MYERS: Every square foot of the park contains so much life, it takes a volunteer crew about 2 hours to go half a mile. At the end, they find something else - a rare parasitic fungus.
HOLLINGER: I thought it would take a little longer.
BOGGESS: It was just right down here?
HOLLINGER: Yeah, it was just on that second branch I looked at.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Wow.
MYERS: The magnifying glass comes out, and everyone slowly leans in for a good look.
For NPR News, I'm Katie Myers in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
(SOUNDBITE OF SEAN ANGUS WATSON'S "THE WOODS") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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