Blue Ridge Parkway, NC/VA Wildlife Survey

The Blue Ridge Parkway runs for nearly 470 miles and connects Shenandoah National Park with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The Blue Ridge Parkway extends almost 4 degrees in longitude and 2 ½ degrees in latitude, giving the Parkway the third largest geographic range of any unit in the National Park System. Further, with an annual visitation of over 15 million people, the Parkway is one of the most visited units of the National Park Service in the country!

The Blue Ridge Parkway travels through the heart of the southern Appalachian Mountains—one of the most biologically diverse region’s on the planet! As a result, the Parkway forms a unique transect from which to study biodiversity and the role and impact of people on the regions biological diversity. 

Through the use of “wildlife cameras” park biologists hope to study not only what animals call the Parkway home, but the role that humans play in influencing wildlife along the Parkway corridor. The cameras will hopefully give us a clearer “picture” of the health of the southern Appalachian ecosystems and habitats along the Parkway. 

Over the next several years, park staff will be working with a number of our partner organizations including the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation and the Friends of the Blue Ridge Parkway to train volunteer “citizen scientists” on how to set up and monitor cameras. We hope to place cameras at study sites all up and down the entire 470-mile corridor of the Blue Ridge Parkway. 

While we consider this a serious scientific endeavor, there’s nothing that says you can’t have fun while carrying out science! One of the best things about this project and others like it is that you never know what you’re going to capture on camera!