Discover Life in America, or DLiA, is a non-profit organization that operates out of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park with the goal of documenting every living species within the park. This unique project, dubbed the “All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory” (ATBI) was started on Earth Day of 1998 and has been ongoing for over 25 years now. Since its inception the organization has been able to add over 11,000 new species records to the park, of those records 1,083 of them were new to science entirely.

As incredible as these numbers are, the ATBI and Discover Life are about more than just identifying and counting the different species in the park, it is about understanding habitats, ecosystems, and the relationships between these species. They believe that the more we understand about the natural world, the better equipped we are to preserve and maintain it. Using community outreach, as well as collaborating with the park and other researchers around the world, they are able to inform a wider audience about the importance of this mission.