In closing our 25th Anniversary year of the All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory (ATBI), Discover Life in America Podcast host, Jaimie Matzko, talks to Keith Langdon, retired GSMNP Supervisory Biologist, also known as the "Father of the ATBI" to find out what it like to start such an ambitious project.

The Smokies ATBI, a project that Discover Life in America manages in partnership with GSMNP, seeks to catalog the estimated 60,000-80,000 species of living organisms in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. A brainchild of renowned ecologist Dan Janzen, the first ATBI was supposed to take place in the rainforests of northwest Costa Rica.  Due to bureaucratic difficulties, however, the location was changed to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

The idea behind an All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory (ATBI) is simple.  If we want to be good stewards of our environment and keep the world around us healthy and vibrant, we need to understand the web of biodiversity.  The information we need—how many species live in an environment, what jobs these species do and how they interact with each other—is largely unknown.

Learn more at dlia.org.

For more details on our Smokies Most Wanted Initiative, visit us at dlia.org/smokiesmostwanted