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The black bear is the 12th most-sighted Smokies species on the iNaturalist app.
Great Smoky Mountains National Park is partnering with the Discover Life in America to allow park visitors to help conserve park species by recording sightings of plants, animals and other organizations on their smartphones, via the nature app iNaturalist.
The program, called Smokies Most Wanted, allows users to post images of flora and fauna on iNaturalist, which engages a vast community of users—including scientists and knowledgeable amateurs—to help identify the species found.
The Smokies, home to 60,000-80,000 species and thus among the richest wildlife regions on the planet, has a list of 112 most-sought after species, including 42 plants, 17 butterflies and moths, 11 birds and six lichens/fungi.
Smokies Most Wanted is an extension of the All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory, DLiA’s ongoing project to catalog all life in the Smokies.
For more information: dlia.org/smokiesmmostwanted.
To view the list of most wanted: inaturalist.org/9115.
The story above first appeared in our May / June 2022 issue.
