Smoky Mountains Around Town / November 2018

Page 10 Around Town
Biodiversity Inventory Reaches 1,000 New Species Mark
Lecanora sachsiana
Great Smoky Mountains National Park and its non-profit
partner, Discover Life in America (DLIA), recently
celebrated the 20th year of the All Taxa Biodiversity
Inventory (ATBI) with the announcement of a major
milestone of the project - 1,000 new species to science!
Over the last 20 years, many species have been
documented in the park for the first time, but the number
of species discovered that are completely new to science
- meaning they haven’t been documented anywhere on
Earth before - is truly amazing. The most recent additions
come from the work of lichenologists Erin Tripp, of the
University of Colorado, and James Lendemer, of the
New York Botanical Garden, who have added five more
new-to-science species to the tally, bringing the total up
pertusaria superiana
to 1,000. The past 10 years of their research, which is a
part of the overall ATBI, has increased the parks
knowledge of its lichen fauna by 130% over the original
diversity estimates. The five new lichens were named to
commemorate NPS staff who played a role in their work.
In 1998, the park and DLIA formed a partnership to
conduct the ATBI to discover and understand all the
species that inhabit the park’s 522,000 acres, including
plants, fungi, millipedes, crayfish, tardigrades (water
bears), worms, insects, and many other groups. The
project involves cooperating scientists from all over the
US and abroad, park staff, students, and volunteer
“citizen scientists.” Overall, the ATBI has more than
doubled the number of species known to the park, from
Leprocaulon nicholsiae
about 9,300 historic species records to 19,866 species
known to the park today.
ATBI research provides crucial information for park
managers and leads to a better understanding of
ecosystem function and how it is dependent on
biodiversity. The project involves students of all ages in
the process of discovery, which ultimately inspires them
to be the next generation of park stewards.
More info about science and research in the park:
www.nps.gov/grsm/learn/scienceresearch. To learn
more about DLIA, and learn how to get involved in the
ATBI project: 865-430-4757, visit www.dlia.org, or find
them on Facebook.
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• You can survive without eating for weeks, but you will only live 11 days without sleep.
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In the autumn of 1929, Anne Morrow
Lindbergh and her husband Charles flew
across the Yucatán Peninsula. With Charles at
the controls, Anne snapped photographs of the
jungles just below.
She wrote in her journal of Maya structures
obscured by large humps of vegetation. A
bright stone wall peeked through the leaves,
"unspeakably alone and majestic and desolate
- the mark of a great civilization gone."
Nearly a century later, surveyors once again
took flight over the ancient Maya empire, and
mapped the Guatemala forests with lasers.
The 2016 survey, whose first results were
published this week in the journal Science,
comprises a dozen plots covering 830 square
miles, an area larger than the island of Maui.
The largest survey of the Maya region, ever.
The study authors describe the results as a
revelation. "It's like putting glasses on when
your eyesight is blurry," said study author
Mary Jane Acuña, director of El Tintal
Archaeological Project in Guatemala.
In the past, archaeologists had argued that
small, disconnected city-states dotted the
Maya lowlands, though that conception is
falling out of favor.
This study shows that the Maya could
extensively "exploit and manipulate" their
environment and geography, Acuña said.
Maya agriculture sustained large populations,
who in turn forged relationships across the
region.
The Maya Civilization was far more Complex than we thought,
Major Discovery has Revealed
by Ben Guarino, The Washington Post
Combing through the scans, Acuña and her
colleagues, an international 18-strong
scientific team, tallied 61,480 structures.
These included: 60 miles of causeways, roads
and canals that connected cities; large maize
farms; houses large and small; and,
surprisingly, defensive fortifications that
suggest the Maya came under attack from the
west of Central America.
"We were all humbled," said Tulane University
anthropologist Marcello Canuto, the study's
lead author.
"All of us saw things we had walked over and
we realized, oh wow, we totally missed that."
Preliminary images from the survey went
public in February, to the delight of
archaeologists like Sarah Parcak. Parcak, who
was not involved with the research, wrote on
Twitter, "Hey all: you realize that researchers
just used lasers to find 60,000 new sites in
Guatemala? This is HOLY [expletive]
territory.”
Parcak, whose space archaeology program
GlobalXplorer.org has been described as the
love child of Google Earth and Indiana Jones,
is a champion of using satellite data to
remotely observe sites in Egypt and elsewhere.
“The scale of information that we're able to
collect now is unprecedented," Parcak said,
adding that this survey is "going to upend longheld
theories about ancient Maya society.”
With support from a Guatemala-based heritage
foundation called Pacunam, the researchers
conducted the massive and expensive survey
using lidar, or light detection and ranging.
They mapped several active archaeological
sites, plus well-studied Maya cities like Tikal
and Uaxactun.
Lidar's principles are similar to radar, except
instead of radio waves lidar relies on laser
light. From an aircraft flying just a few
thousand feet above the canopy, the surveyors
prickled each square meter with 15 laser
pulses. Those pulses penetrate vegetation but
bounce back from hard stone surfaces. Using
lidar, you can't see the forest through the
invisible trees.
Beneath the thick jungle, ruins appeared. Lots
and lots of them. Extrapolated over the 36,700
square miles, which encompasses the total
Maya lowland region, the authors estimate the
Maya built as many as 2.7 million structures.
These would have supported 7 million to 11
million people during the Classic Period of
Maya civilization, around the years 650 to 800,
in line with other Maya population estimates.
Archaeologist Arlen Chase, a Maya specialist
at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas who
was not involved with this survey, said for
years he has argued that the Maya society was
more complex than widely accepted.
In 1998, he and archaeologist Diane Chase, his
wife, described elaborate agricultural terraces
at the Maya city of Caracol in Belize.
"Everybody would not believe we had
terraces!" he said.
He gets much less push back now, he said.
"The paradigm shift that we've predicted was
happening is in fact happening" Chase said,
which he credits to lidar data. He has seen lidar
evolve from a "hush-hush type of technology"
used by the military to map Fallujah streets to a
powerful archaeological tool.
Chase, who previously used lidar at Caracol,
where as many as 100,000 people lived,
compares this technology to carbon-14 dating.
Radiocarbon dating gives archaeologists a
much more accurate timeline.
L i d a r i s a b o u t t o d o t h e s a m e f o r
archaeologists' sense of space, particularly in
densely forested areas near the equator. Two
years ago, researchers used lidar mapped
dense urban infrastructure around Angkor, the
seat of the medieval Khmer Empire in
Cambodia.
For all its power, lidar cannot supplant oldfashioned
archaeology. For 8 percent of the
survey area, the archaeologists confirmed the
lidar data with boots-on-the-ground visits.
This "ground truthing" suggests that the lidar
analysis was conservative - they found the
predicted structures, and then some.
"There is still much more ground to cover and
work to do," said Acuña, who will continue to
study the large ancient Maya city of El Tindal.
Could you imagine, Canuto said, what might
be found through a lidar survey of the
Amazon? With technology like this, no
forested frontiers are final.