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Great Smoky Mountains National Park Species SnapIt and MapIt

The Species SnapIt & MapIt project empowers visitors to Great Smoky Mountains National Park to record and report valuable information about the animals, plants and other organisms they see in the park. Participants are encouraged to look for certain under-studied species in the park and to share their observations using an app called iNaturalist. Their observations are used to develop new species distribution maps for a public NPS web tool called Atlas of the Smokies. This tool allows users to visualize where a species has been found across the park and see where else it is likely to occur, based on a number of environmental factors. Park officials use these maps to make informed land management decisions, while researchers use them to better understand the spatial distribution of life across the Smokies.

Project URL: https://dlia.org/snapit-mapit

Geographic Scope: Great Smoky Mountains National Park (Tennessee and North Carolina)

Project Status: Active - recruiting volunteers

Participation Tasks: Annotation, Audio or video recording, Identification, Observation, Photography,

Start Date: 03/01/2019

Project Contact: Paul_Super@nps.gov

Federal Government Sponsor:

NPS logo

Other Federal Government Sponsor:

Fields of Science: Animals, Birds, Nature and outdoors, Pollinators/insects

Intended Outcomes: This project, overseen by Discover Life in America, aims to benefit from the observational skills of park visitors to help develop distribution probability maps for species found in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.