Making a Name for Himself
Piscataway Park, which protects views from historic Mount Vernon, opened while Keith Langdon was still attending high school in nearby southern Maryland. The budding naturalist landed a summer job doing everything from boundary marking and maintenance to banding birds. He continued seasonal work during college. After completing a master’s degree in physical geography, Langdon realized the National Park System includes “an eclectic mix of environments” and aimed to work in parks with high biodiversity. His primary interest is biogeography—the study of the physical distributions of life forms and pinpointing where rare species occur.
In his first permanent job as a ranger at Shenandoah National Park, Langdon scrutinized the roadsides for unusual plants while on law enforcement patrols. After stints at Hot Springs National Park and Catoctin Mountain Park, Langdon transferred to Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where he has coordinated the park’s Inventory and Monitoring Program for the last dozen years. Surrounded by maps and detailed field guides, Langdon and his staff issue and oversee 200 scientific research permits annually.
Meetings and computer-based data management keep him in the office during the week, but on weekends he loves to wander the park. With his insatiable curiosity, keen eye, and the mind of a scientist, little escapes Langdon’s scrutiny. Soon after arriving in the Smokies, he discovered dragonflies and moths never before documented in the park. Today he’s enchanted with damselflies, lichens, and snails. Drifting into the minutiae of science, and loving every minute of it, he will tell you that the snails seem to be suffering from decreased diversity because of calcium loss in soils altered by acid rain.
“When people think of life in parks, they generally visualize small numbers of mammal or tree species,” says Langdon, a hint of regret evident in his voice because too many people overlook the algae, fungi, and tiny insects he studies so closely. In 1998 he and U.S. Geological Survey colleague Chuck Parker estimated that 40,000 to 70,000 species above the microbe level might exist in the Smokies. Partnering with university researchers and volunteers, the park initiated an All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory (ATBI). “National parks and other national trust lands have been very slow to identify and quantify resources,” he explains. “It’s a basic business principle to do an inventory, and that’s [the logic] behind the current emphasis of Parks for Science: An ATBI study creates an invaluable baseline measurement of the country’s health.”
By December 2004, 543 species completely new to science and 3,358 new geographical records had been documented in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and the totals increase monthly. “The real benefit is that we are sampling thousands of locations in the park systematically,” Langdon continues, “so that over the years, we’ll know when and where species occur and their relative abundance.”
Critics might ask, why expend effort on obscure insects or fungi? As Langdon is happy to point out, the Smokies are a world “hot spot” for slime molds, simple-celled predators that eat bacteria on logs. Researchers have identified a cellular structure in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases—called a Hirano body—that is also present in a slime mold common in the park. Experiments have revealed that these Hirano bodies kill human cervical cancer cells, but until recently they could be studied only in human cadavers. Now, using slime mold cultures, scientists can study them in living cells. “We can never predict what will be of value to science and medicine,” says Langdon. “The ramifications go way beyond what might be expected.”
And the program is growing beyond the park’s borders: Langdon and his staff have recently hosted observers and traveled to other parks to help replicate the program. At Point Reyes National Seashore, Acadia National Park in Maine, and Yellowstone National Park, researchers are gearing up for what Langdon hopes will become “a ground-swell of biodiversity discovery and understanding.”
