NSF Program: Biodiversity Surveys and Inventories PIs: Karen Hughes, Ron Petersen, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Comprising more than half a million acres, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GSMNP) is a region of exceptional biodiversity, a consequence of the age of the mountains, varied terrain and ice-age history. The Park is a refuge for disjunct elements of northern forests, relicts of glacial refugia, and for flora now found in Central America and Mexico. Many life forms in the Park are poorly known, poorly documented, or entirely undiscovered. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park is the site of an ambitious project to document its biodiversity, the All Taxon Biodiversity Inventory (ATBI). Among the most important but least understood elements of biodiversity are the fungi, which play essential roles in forest health including degradation of dead materials and essential symbioses with plants.
This award is for coordination of an effort to document a portion of the fungal diversity in the Park. Twenty researchers from the United States, Europe and Mexico will collect and document agaric fungi (mushrooms and their relatives) in the GSMNP over the next four years. Collections data will be recorded in a database which will be available to the public and to other researchers, and which will serve as a model for future studies. On-line species pages will be created, providing information and a photograph for each species identified. Accurate location data for each collection will allow evaluation of the relationship of fungal species, forest types, and pollution patterns in the form of acid rain. Assemblages of species associated with specific locales will be evaluated and compared with collections from the same locale 40 years ago (collections maintained in the University of Tennessee herbarium -TENN). Finally, the project will continue to database TENN in order to make all TENN collections from the GSMNP available on line.
The grant also provides for hosting a 3-day "mycoblitz" in conjunction with the Mycological Society of America meetings in Asheville, North Carolina. The mycoblitz is a cooperative activity among mycologists at the University of Tennessee, Duke University and the Mycological Society of America and will include fungal researchers from all fungal groups including chytrids, ascomycetes, zygomycetes and other basidiomycetes to get a "snapshot" of overall fungal biodiversity.
