Herpetofauna of Steele Creek Park (Sullivan County, TN), with Comments on Species–Area Relationships of Amphibians and Reptiles in Eastern Tennessee

Lance D. Jessee^1,*, Jeremy B. Stout¹, and John N. McMeen²

¹The Nature Center at Steele Creek Park, Bristol, TN 37620. ²Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Northeast State Community College, Blountville, TN 37617. *Corresponding author.

Southeastern Naturalist, Volume 21, Issue 1 (2022): 63–73

Abstract
Steele Creek Park, a large municipal park in Sullivan County in northeastern Tennessee, has had nearly continuous observations of natural history data from trained naturalists for more than half a century. Here, we present a herpetofaunal list of species for the park that comprises: 10 species of frogs, 11 species of salamanders, 2 species of lizards, 11 species of snakes, and 7 species of turtles. The inventory includes 10 species previously unreported in Sullivan County. We then compared the park data with increasingly larger land areas in eastern Tennessee to establish a regional species–area curve for herpetofaunal richness that could have predictive capabilities for similar sites in the southern Appalachians.

Download Full-text pdf (Accessible only to subscribers. To subscribe click here.)