The complete register

All nineteen entries

Every entry in the publication, by section. Every entry is one thing the wet, unglaciated ground made possible.

• 01.1Older than the AlpsGround-down remnants of a range once Alpine in scale, and what several hundred million years of erosion leaves behind.
• 01.2Never glaciatedThe ice stopped north of here, so lineages accumulated instead of being scraped off — the single fact behind the diversity.
• 01.3Cove and ridgeAspect, elevation and moisture produce forest types that change within a few hundred metres.

• 02.1LunglessPlethodontids breathe through skin, which requires permanently damp ground, ties them to a slope and is why a single ridge can hold a species found nowhere else.
• 02.2One ridge onlyEndemism at the scale of a mountain, and how the boundaries between close relatives are worked out.
• 02.3The hellbenderCryptobranchus alleganiensis, a giant aquatic salamander that needs water clean enough to have become rare.

• 03.1Rainforest volumesSome slopes take well over two metres of rain a year, which is temperate rainforest by any reasonable definition.
• 03.2Orographic liftAir forced up the escarpment cools and drops its water, and the wet side is not a coincidence.
• 03.3Wet litterThe damp layer of leaves and rotting wood is the habitat, not the setting.

• 04.1Spruce and firRed spruce and Fraser fir stranded on the highest ground since the last glaciation, a boreal island in a temperate range.
• 04.2The balsam woolly adelgidAn introduced insect that killed most mature Fraser fir, and the grey standing trunks that record it.

• 05.1Grass where forest should beTreeless summits below the treeline, in the Roan Highlands and elsewhere, that nobody has fully explained.
• 05.2Competing explanationsFire, grazing, ice damage, indigenous management — the evidence supports several and settles none.

• 06.1Castanea dentataA quarter of the canopy in places, gone within fifty years of the blight identified at the Bronx Zoo in 1904.
• 06.2What replaced itOak and hickory filled the gap, and the animals that depended on the mast did not get an equivalent.
• 06.3The stumps still sproutRoot systems survive and send up shoots that die before maturity, which is why the species is not quite extinct.

• 07.1André MichauxThe French botanist climbed Grandfather Mountain in 1794 convinced he had reached the highest point in North America and sang the Marseillaise at the top.
• 07.2Elisha MitchellDied in 1857 while re-measuring the peak that now carries his name, in a dispute about which summit was highest.
• 07.3Counting everythingThe all-taxa inventory in the national park set out to record every species present, and keeps finding new ones.