What: Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont
Where: Located approximately 130 miles from Chattanooga in the historic Walker Valley section of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, just outside of Townsend, Tenn.
For more information: Visit the Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont website to learn more about their citizen science offerings, school programs, workshops, summer youth programs and camps, and naturalist certification classes. Contact Tiffany Beachy, citizen science coordinator, with specific citizen science questions at (865) 448-9732.
Great Smoky Mountains National Park is world-renowned for its diversity of plant and animal life. Designated an International Biosphere Reserve in 1976, the park’s half-million acres are home to more than 31 species of salamanders, some 100 species of native trees, over 1,500 flowering plant species, more than 200 species of birds, 66 types of mammals, 50 native fish species, 39 varieties of reptiles, and 43 species of amphibians, as well as mollusks, millipedes and mushrooms.
For those wanting to learn more about the wonder of the natural world within the park, one of the most exciting ways to do that is tagging along with a naturalist or scientist. Opportunities to pair with researchers and naturalists have increased in the park since the establishment of the All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory (ATBI), which seeks to identify and monitor all species of life within the park. However, the long-time purveyor of educational fun in the park has been the Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont. Located within the historic Walker Valley section of the park—just outside of Townsend, Tenn.—this environmental education center’s mission since 1969 has been to “connect people and nature.”
Tremont offers educational programs for schools, individuals and families, naturalist certification classes, summer youth programs and camps, and family camp programs. However, one of their most exciting (and free) offerings is their citizen science programs. Citizen science is a growing field that engages volunteers in scientific investigations that require data to be gathered or processed over long periods of time and/or wide geographic areas. Citizen science projects have goals for science—such as documenting changes in populations of plants or animals or variations in the quality of air or water—and/or goals for learning, such as improving participant understanding of scientific content or capacity for addressing scientific issues.
Tremont offers a number of citizen science programs for school groups and volunteers of all ages: Monarch butterfly tagging in the fall, pond breeding amphibian monitoring in the spring, bird banding in the summer, and year-round terrestrial and aquatic salamander monitoring and fungi mapping. Citizen science research data is shared with collaborating scientists and park resource managers, as well as the All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory.
“Our citizen science projects allow volunteers and students to become scientists for a day,” says Tiffany Beachy, citizen scientist coordinator at Tremont. “Many people feel like science is unapproachable, but these programs make it more tangible and help them feel like they are taking part in something bigger than themselves.”
Beachy says Monarch butterfly tagging, birding banding, and pond breeding amphibian monitoring programs are most conducive for groups. The terrestrial and aquatic salamander monitoring programs are reserved for school groups in order to prevent too much disturbance to ecosystems.
Tremont—one of only a few nature centers in the country located within the boundaries of a national park—recently added phenology to its citizen science offerings, a branch of science dealing with the relations between climate and periodic biological phenomena. Volunteers visit one of eight designated plots within the Walker Valley section of the national park to observe and record data on the phenophases of individually marked trees, to note blooming wildflowers within a subplot, and to watch and listen for the presence of eight species of songbirds.
“Phenology lists have been kept at Tremont for decades, so this citizen science project allows us to monitor changes in the ecosystem over time,” says Beachy, who received her graduate degree in Wildlife Science from the University of Tennessee and has worked at Tremont for a year now. “Volunteers receive packets and are sent out to make observations about the trees, wildflowers and birds in an area.”
To learn more about citizen scientist volunteer opportunities at Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont as they arise, email science@gsmit.org. Visit Tremont’s website to learn more about their program offerings.
Jenni Frankenberg Veal enjoys writing about the natural world and the people who work to protect it. She is rarely found without her daughters and a pair of shoes appropriate for hiking and rock-hopping in creeks. Visit her blog at YourOutdoorFamily.com.
