Planthopper and Leafhopper Diversity of the Great Smokey Mountains National Park (Hemiptera: Fulgoroidea & Cicadellidae)

For this study, I recruited two undergraduate students to investigate the species diversity of the planthoppers and leafhoppers from the ATBI pilot study malaise traps. For this, I recruited Dan Nonne to work on leafhoppers (Cicadellidae, excluding the Typhlocybinae) and Anthony Gonzon to work on planthoppers (Fulgoroidea), and the results reported here for this year is the result of the efforts of these students. For the students, these projects were performed as honors projects and were a portion of their undergraduate degree program. Anthony’s work on planthoppers will extend my research on planthoppers in the Park initiated in 2002. Dan’s research on leafhoppers will represent my first investigation of leafhoppers species richness, although there are good baseline data in the Park collections and in unpublished Park records.

The student projects were to conduct diversity analyses (including species accumulation curves), predict total species richness of their target insects in the Park, and compile species list including records from the NPS collection and previous research. These analyses are still ongoing; in part because the due dates for the final projects in the honors curriculum is not for two more weeks, but also because the data are complex and each analysis seems to invite additional questions. At present, a more compete analysis has been made for leafhoppers. The students have also prepared reference collections for the NPS and have already provided specimen data to the NPS.