Backyard Explorers: The Tennesseans Quietly Rewriting the Wildlife Record Books

Most people drive past Cane Creek without a second thought. It's a slim ribbon of water cutting through Van Buren County, flanked by sycamores and the kind of dense riverside brush that makes you think twice about stepping off the gravel. But for Donna Fitch, a retired middle school science teacher from Spencer, that creek is basically an open laboratory — and for the past six years, she's been logging every living thing she can find in it.

So far, she's documented 14 aquatic invertebrate species that had never been formally recorded in that watershed. Three of them may be entirely new to science.

"People think discovery happens in the Amazon," she says, pulling a field notebook out of a canvas bag so worn it looks like it's been through a few floods. "But I'm finding things two miles from my house."

Donna isn't alone. Across Tennessee — in the hollows of the Cumberland Plateau, along the margins of the Great Smoky Mountains, in the cedar glades of the central basin, and even in suburban greenways — a loose, passionate network of citizen scientists is documenting wildlife, plant species, and ecological phenomena that the formal scientific community simply hasn't had the time or the resources to chase down. They're using apps, spreadsheets, trail cameras, and good old-fashioned patience to fill in the gaps, and what they're finding is quietly reshaping how researchers understand Tennessee's extraordinary biodiversity.

iNaturalist and the Democratization of Discovery

The tool that's changed everything is iNaturalist, a free platform that lets anyone upload photos of plants, fungi, animals, and insects and get them identified by a global community of experts and enthusiasts. Tennessee consistently ranks among the most active states on the platform, with hundreds of thousands of observations logged annually.

"Tennessee is one of the most biodiverse states in the country, full stop," says Marcus Holley, a botanist at a state university who works closely with amateur naturalists. "We have more freshwater fish species than almost anywhere in North America. We have salamander diversity that rivals tropical regions. And we genuinely do not have a complete picture of what's out there. The citizen scientists are helping close that gap in ways that would take decades and enormous funding to replicate through formal research alone."

For a lot of folks, the journey started with a single unexpected photograph. A Knoxville software developer named Ray Seo uploaded a picture of a moth he found on his porch screen in 2021 and got back a response that stopped him cold: the pattern didn't match any known species in the database. What followed was a two-year correspondence with lepidopterists at two different universities, culminating in a paper that formally described a new species found in East Tennessee. Ray is listed as a co-discoverer.

"I still can't fully process it," he says with a laugh. "I was just trying to figure out what was eating my sweaters."

The Cedar Glades and the People Who Love Them Too Much to Ignore

Down in Rutherford and Wilson counties, a group of plant enthusiasts has been systematically surveying the cedar glades — those strange, rocky, almost moonlike open patches scattered through Middle Tennessee's limestone country. These glades host an astonishing number of endemic plant species, meaning plants that grow nowhere else on Earth. They're also poorly mapped, frequently threatened by development, and wildly underappreciated.

Carla Biggs, a Nashville-area landscape designer who got obsessed with glades after a friend dragged her to one in 2019, now spends most of her weekends crouched over rare spring wildflowers with a macro lens. She's helped document populations of Tennessee coneflower and glade cress in areas where they weren't previously recorded, and she's become something of an informal guide for other naturalists who want to learn the glades.

"There's this plant called the limestone fame flower," she says. "It blooms for about three weeks in late summer and it's incredibly easy to miss. I've probably walked past it a dozen times before I knew what I was looking for. Now I find new populations every season."

The documentation work Carla and her colleagues are doing has real-world consequences. Several glade sites have gained additional protection after amateur surveys flagged previously unknown populations of listed rare species. Conservation decisions that once relied entirely on academic surveys are now being informed by people who just really, really love plants.

Trail Cameras, Creek Walks, and the Long Game

Not everything happens in real time. Some of Tennessee's most dedicated citizen naturalists are playing a long game, setting trail cameras deep in the woods and returning weeks later to sift through thousands of images. In Fentress County, a retired mail carrier named Gene Pruett has been running a network of 22 cameras across a 400-acre family property for nearly a decade. He's documented 11 mammal species, 4 reptile species, and more bird behavior than he can keep up with logging.

Last fall, one of his cameras captured footage of a bobcat carrying prey across a ridgeline at 3 a.m. — unremarkable on its own, except that the prey appeared to be an Eastern spotted skunk, a species considered rare in Tennessee and rarely photographed in the wild. The footage was flagged by a wildlife biologist who'd been trying to track spotted skunk activity in the region for years.

"Gene basically handed us a data point we'd been looking for," the biologist told us. "That's what citizen science does. It puts eyes in places we can never be."

What This Means for the Rest of Us

There's something genuinely moving about what's happening here. At a time when so much of the natural world feels like it's slipping away — when headlines about habitat loss and species decline seem relentless — these Tennesseans are pushing back with nothing more than curiosity and time. They're proving that discovery isn't the exclusive property of institutions. It belongs to anyone willing to look.

Donna Fitch puts it simply, flipping to a new page in her notebook where a careful pencil sketch of a tiny crustacean sits next to a ruler for scale.

"Every time I find something nobody's recorded before, I think about how long it's been living here without us knowing," she says. "That's not sad to me. That's hope. There's still so much world left."

If you want to get started yourself, iNaturalist is free to download. Tennessee also has active chapters of the Native Plant Society, the Tennessee Ornithological Society, and several regional naturalist groups that welcome beginners. The next undiscovered species might be closer than you think.