Humble and not the least bit flamboyant, Todd Witcher lights up when he starts talking about all the insects, including his favorite – fireflies – that live in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
The same goes for a giant earthworm uncovered along the Appalachian Trail. “That’s a new species to science, about 18 inches long,” he points out, as if he has just won the lottery.
Keeping up with the flora and fauna of the GSMNP is much more than a hobby for Witcher. It’s been his life’s work for the past 19 years as executive director of the Gatlinburg-based Discover Life in America, a nonprofit organization and GSMNP science partner dedicated to researching the thousands of organisms in the Smokies and sharing the findings with the public.
“It’s really hard to protect things if you don’t know about them or don’t even know they exist,” says Witcher, 62. “Part of what we do is gather baseline information that is going to be important, moving forward, for the organisms we don’t know much about. If we don’t know where they are, and how many there are, if they’re rare or common, if they’re an important pollinator, then we will not be able to conserve them properly.”
Witcher is now making plans to retire at the end of the year. Under his leadership, colleagues say, the organization has excelled in establishing vast global networks of researchers and coordinating with them to study new life in the GSMNP. Since its inception in 1998, DLiA and its partners have found more than 1,100 new-to-science animals and plants and 12,000 additional species never before documented inside the Park, more than doubling the number previously thought to exist there.
Frances Figart, creative services director at Smokies Life, a membership organization that partners with the National Park Service, says she was impressed from the moment she heard Witcher speak at a nature store in Asheville, where he primarily talked about the Park’s famous synchronous fireflies. It was 2012, and this was the first she’d heard of them. Since then, the two have worked together to communicate their shared passion for science with the public.
“Todd has led this colossal work, coordinating a huge community of scientists, nature enthusiasts and Park visitors to accomplish what for someone else might have seemed impossible,” Figart says. “Todd’s soft-spoken, earnest, sensible demeanor has a stabilizing effect on those around him. … Although he knows quite a bit about many of the nearly 23,000 known Smokies species, the majority of which are insects, unlike many who work in scientific fields, Todd remains ever willing to say, ‘I don’t know.’ He readily defers to others even when he is clearly the expert in the room.”
Thinking ahead to her friend’s departure from DLiA later this year, Figart notes, “His big-picture thinking is complemented by an inspector’s eye for detail, both of which have served him well in his nonprofit leadership role. … Not unlike the fireflies he loves and has shown to so many, I believe his wisdom, strength and grace will illuminate the path to success for Discover Life in America many years into the future.”
Merging science and community
Witcher’s grandparents on both sides served as important role models for the conservationist sensibilities he developed as a ninth-generation Tennessean in the small, rural town of Red Boiling Springs, near the Kentucky state line. Farmers and conservationists, they taught him a lot about taking care of the land and its inhabitants.
“They weren’t wasteful, for one thing,” he says. “Even if they ate the animals and ate the plants, they were taken care of and grown in sustainable ways. We didn’t produce garbage that I ever remember. That was just a land ethic that we probably are losing slowly, and I learned it from my family.”
Studying biology at the University of Tennessee, Witcher thought he might become a veterinarian. But, while finishing his undergrad degree and making plans to return for a master’s in education – “There was a need for science educators at that time,” he says – he got a job in 1987 that nudged him down a slightly different path.
In his early days as a live-in caretaker at Ijams Nature Center, he taught school in Oak Ridge while acquainting young visitors to Ijams with the native wonders of the outdoors. Later, he went full time at the nature center, where he stayed for a total of 18 years.
“Part of my job at Ijams was going out to underserved schools in the inner city, so there were lots of ‘aha!’ moments. We used to let kids touch a snake. It wasn’t dangerous, but the looks on kids’ faces. They were obviously terrified of snakes, and it really did make a difference in their ability to accept it as something that is not to be afraid of.”
Witcher had only read about DLiA’s flagship project, the All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory, which was launched in 1998, the same year as the organization itself. But when a friend told him about the vacant executive director position in 2007, he says, “It sounded right down my alley.”
He was happy at Ijams, but the new role would allow him to better unite science professionals and area residents. “One of the attractions I had to what DLiA does is connecting the average person and immersing the community in science rather than science being separated. I love that part of what DLiA stood for: connecting people and getting them engaged, because I think they become more interested in the subject matter instantly. … It was more into the actual science itself and collecting data and using that for conservation purposes.
“Growing up in Middle Tennessee (Red Boiling Springs), the Smokies are where we vacationed, so getting to work in the Smokies was not something you would turn down.”
As DLiA has grown from a one-man band, Witcher has shouldered more of the strategic, fundraising and grant-writing duties while shifting much of the interaction with scientists and educational programming to his staff of five and thousands of volunteers. But his own childlike wonder for the Park’s natural environment has never gone away.
From the outset, Witcher was drawn like a moth to a flame to one DLiA goal in particular: boosting appreciation for insects. “We accomplished a lot within individual groups of organisms that the Park wants to know more about – more butterflies, more moths. We’ve spent a lot of time on beetles, which make up a big part of the arthropod biodiversity of the Park.”
Now modeled by other organizations, the ATBI has served as the framework for this growing awareness. “Our mission is really to document every living thing in the park,” Witcher says. “We work to learn about what it does, where it lives, if it’s common, and what other things it interacts with. Is it a predator? Is it prey? Is it a pollinator?”
Shining a light on the obscure
Such questions aren’t just intriguing to the science-y folks in the Smokies. They’re essential to helping the species survive. “If we know where something is fairly rare, or an area where there might be too many people going there, if we know enough about that spot or the area or the habitat or the species, we can maybe help the Park direct people onto other trails,” Witcher says. “If you know they’re there, and what they need, then you can conserve them better.”
While most animal research focuses on mammals, birds and reptiles, Witcher points out, a high percentage of the organisms studied in the Smokies are “obscure.”
“Many times, there are only one or two specialists in the world. We can’t get all the ID work, especially, or all the research done locally or regionally, because there’s just not someone [here] who might work on a particular kind of snail or fly or one of the more than 2,500 butterflies we have in the Park.”
To draw these highly-trained scientists, DLiA provides grants raised through special events. Other public-facing activities include Bio Blitzes, which take visitors into the wild to collect data using the iNaturalist app.
Since Congressional funding for NPS projects tends to ebb and flow, Park partners like DLiA often step in to fill in the gaps. “We’ve not always, as a society, supported science as much as we should,” Witcher says. “I think that it’s gotten better, but it’s still not where it should be. People are a lot more interested again in getting engaged in science, which is maybe the most exciting part.”
In these last few months before his retirement, Witcher is looking ahead to the future while “trying to capture the things in my brain that I don’t really know are in my brain that might need to stay with DLiA when I leave.”
After that, he says, “I’ll do more traveling. I’ll do more gardening. I’ll do more hiking. And I’ll do more resting.”
For now, Witcher is most proud of helping stabilize DLiA and setting it up for long-term conservation success in the GSMNP. “Getting to work with great people, getting to meet world-famous scientists, trying to raise awareness of the importance of the conservation of biodiversity – there are all kinds of really cool things that have happened as part of the job. Of course, getting to work in the Smokies – that is the cherry on top for me.”