Illinois Natural History Survey Reports

              1
I LLINOIS
NATURAL
HI STORY
S U R V E Y R e p o r t s
Summer 2001
No. 368
I N S I D E
Slow the Spread of the
Gypsy Moth
3
Changes in the Pollina-tor
Guild of a Prairie
Species in the Past 70
Years
4
Largemouth Bass Re-cruitment
and Stocking
Strategies
5
Species Spotlight:
Poison Ivy
6
Naturalist's Apprentice:
Poison Ivy Look-alikes
7
New Illinois Wilds Insti-tute
for Nature (IWIN)
Workshop
8
Continued on page 2
If you are ever hiking the trails
down at the Great Smoky Moun-tains
National Park (GSMNP),
you may stumble across a rag-tag
group of botanists from the
Illinois Natural History Survey
(INHS). Now why would a
group of botanists from Illinois
be collecting plants down
there among the Ap-palachian
Mountains?
Because they would be
participating in the larg-est
All Taxa Biodiversity
Inventory (ATBI) ever
to be undertaken on our
planet—the All Taxa Bio-diversity
Inventory of the
Great Smoky Mountains
National Park.
The goal of an ATBI is
to discover and document
all the species that occur
in a specifi c area. The
idea is that if you know
what lives in an area, you
will be able to make better
decisions concerning the
management of the area and
monitor changes over time.
The GSMNP was chosen as a site
for an ATBI because of the rich
and diverse collection of plants
and animals that occur there, and
because of its topography, cli-mate,
and size. The park encom-passes
over half a million acres
that include large tracts of old
growth and contiguous forests. It
has been designated as an Inter-national
Biosphere Reserve.
The ATBI was begun in the
park in 1999 with a deadline of
10–15 years. During this time,
the goal of the organizers is to
have a comprehensive checklist
of all life forms in the park, range
maps for each park species, and
natural history information for
each species. They would also
like to have this information orga-nized
and available to scientists,
educators, land managers, and
anyone else who might fi nd it use-ful
via the World Wide Web and
other media.
Because the National Park Ser-vice
could not hope to complete
this grand-scale project on its
own within the given time frame,
it has called on many partners
from universities and colleges,
museums, other government agen-cies,
and volunteers to help. The
University of Tennessee in Knox-ville
(UT) was one of the fi rst to
get involved. Rick Phillippe, a
botanist at the INHS, had done
his doctoral work at UT and still
had ties to the Botany Depart-ment
there. When he heard of the
ATBI he immediately wanted to
become involved. Not only had
Rick done his doctoral work in
Tennessee, but he also had been
going to the park every year for
almost 20 years to lead wildfl ow-er
hikes for the Smoky Mountains
Wildfl ower Pilgrimage. He was
very familiar with the fl ora of the
Smoky Mountains and was the
perfect candidate to help with the
inventory.
That fi rst year (1999) Rick
didn’t have too much trouble
convincing a couple of fellow
botanists to go along. Hiking,
camping, and collecting plants
in the Appalachian Mountains
INHS Inventories Smoky Mountains Flora
The brilliant scarlet-colored
fi re pink, Silene
virginica. Photo by Connie
Carroll, INHS CTAP Group
INHS staff (from left) Greg Spyreas, Connie Carroll, Rick Phillippe, and Mary
Ann Feist prepare for a day of collecting in the Great Smoky Mountains Na-tional
Park. Photo by Dan Busemeyer, INHS Center for Wildlife Ecology