Inventory and Long-term Ecological Monitoring

Super, Paul

Inventory and Long-term Ecological Monitoring--this is a permit for tracking basic inventory and monitoring activities conducted by GRSM park staff during the performance of their duties. For a better summary of activities under this permit, consult Superintendent's Annual Reports. Permitting programmatic administrative activities was discontinued in 2006. This study was resurrected in 2011 to cover park staff and some partners for their work during off-time and to cover the ozone biomonitoring garden data. The latter used to be covered under study #GRSM-00061. Tremont conducted some inventory work in the Eagle Creek area in 2011 without collecting specimens. Two non-native plant new records were documented in 2014. Eleven new park record vascular plants were collected and documented in 2012, three of them non-native. A new park dragonfly, two new flies, a new bird louse, and several new feather mites (the last mostly from skins made in the 1930s and housed at the Chicago Academy of Science collections) were also documented. The Loblolly Pine was identified for the first time in the park in 1993, as was the Appalachian Eyed Brown butterfly. Collections in 1989 supported work on air pollution effects and American beech decline. This study also covers ozone biomonitoring gardens at Purchase Knob and Tremont. Some plants produced an unexplaned bronzing during 2014 that led to early senescence and prevented recording of ozone damage on these plants. Only six out of 20 of the plants at Purchase Knkob exhibited foliar injury attributed to ozone in 2015. Langdon used recent LiDAR imagery to find remote karst features, including some in the White Oak sinks area that were well above the floor of the sinks, and were not believed to have been visited by biologists before. At least one new cave was discovered and reported to I&M and Wildlife offices.