Great Smoky Mountains National Park beetle inventory: Not done yet, but we can't blame it on the pandemic

Here, we provide a brief retrospective on the Louisiana State Arthropod’s (LSAM) involvement in the All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory (ATBI) of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GSMNP), and an update on additions to our inventory of species during the past 10 years.

Twenty-one years ago, during 2001, we joined the ATBI with CEC as Leader and VMB as Co-leader of the Coleoptera Taxonomic Working Group. From 2001 through 2009, with the help of National Park Service personnel and grants from Discover Life in America (DLIA), and the National Science Foundation , the LSAM team (CEC, VMB, graduate and undergraduate students, post-docs, and visiting scientists) traveled to GSMNP 2-4 times a year. We set traps, hand collected, managed beetle-blitzes, carried out educational workshops and other outreach activities and had an all-around amazing time. More than 40 specialists from around the world assisted at various stages of the project. During the first few years we formulated a hypothesis predicting how many species of Coleoptera would eventually be documented in GSMNP. We settled on 3,000 species. By the end of 2010, when NSF funds were depleted, we were able to list 2,518. Our estimate of 3,000 still seems reasonable today. During the years between 2009 and 2022 we have slowly added specimens to the 40,000 databased GSMNP specimens housed in the LSAM, and identified problem taxa waiting to be identified, or in some cases, described.