Each year for Mother’s Day, flowers are the “gift of choice” for Moms since they represent such colorful beauty, fragrance and intricate designs.
Whether it is a vase of fresh cut flowers, an indoor arrangement or perennials for the outside garden, flowers help us express our heart-felt sentiment on Mother’s Day…
The eastern migratory population of monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) has declined by 80% within the last two decades. One possible cause of this decline is the loss of 1.3 billion stems of milkweed (Asclepias spp.), which monarchs require for reproduction.
In an effort to restore monarchs to a population goal established by the US Fish and Wildlife Service and adopted by Mexico, Canada, and the US, we developed scenarios for amending the Midwestern US landscape with milkweed.
There is growing evidence that many pollinators and plants are being triggered into earlier but not necessarily synchronous activity by the same temperature shifts associated with global warming. Find out what strategies you can implement in your own garden, orchard, or farm to enhance your plant pollinator habitat.
With climatic uncertainty now “the new normal,” many farmers, gardeners, and orchardists in North America are desperately seeking ways to adapt how they grow food in the face of climate change…
A line of people curves like the body of a giant caterpillar, twisting up the mountain into the endangered oyamel fir forest. Michoacán, Mexico—the cloud-misted overwintering site of the monarch butterfly.
Near the middle of the caterpillar of people, I kept pace, thinking about Catholic peregrinos who journey on well-worn footpaths and roads, sometimes hundreds of miles, to reach a precious relic…
We welcome America’s rural and urban communities, faith-based communities, college and university campuses, community gardens and botanical gardens, as well as non-profits of all kinds to join us in a day of action and contemplation for imperiled pollinators from…
Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are not high on most physicians’ worry lists. If we think at all about biotechnology, most of us probably focus on direct threats to human health, such as prospects for converting pathogens to biologic weapons or the implications of new technologies for editing the human germline.
But while those debates simmer, the application of biotechnology to agriculture has been rapid and aggressive.
Nestled between a drumlin and the Ganargua (Mud) Creek, Peacework Organic Farm is the oldest Community Supported Agriculture project in upstate NY, in our 26th year in 2014. Once the Humbert family dairy farm, the 148 acres of high quality land that we steward is the property of the Genesee Land Trust (GLT), which leases 109 acres to Peacework.
Eight years ago, members of the Peacework CSA contributed the money to the land trust to buy this farm when owner Doug Kraai died from cancer.
A survey of monarch butterflies overwintering in California shows that the population has not rebounded. Although the total number of monarchs counted this year was greater than last, the difference is due to a large increase in volunteer effort. Counts at major sites were down when compared to recent years.
Volunteers with the Xerces Society’s Western Monarch Thanksgiving Count visited 253 sites and tallied a total of 298,464 monarchs—a fraction of the 1.2 million monarchs recorded in the late 1990s.
You could make a good case that the Monarch butterfly is America’s favorite insect. Unfortunately, it’s in a death spiral, of our making, as we may have lost 90 percent of the Monarch. This week, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service unveiled a massive effort to save the Monarch migration, which will soon carry the butterflies over Oklahoma, on their way from Mexico to the upper Midwest.
We used to be able to blame the Monarch’s decline on Mexican farmers, who cut down the trees in the butterfly’s over-wintering grounds.
They’re small and operate behind the scenes, but they’re critical to agriculture — and Congress is starting to notice. Honeybees are responsible for pollinating everything from apple orchards to vegetable patches, contributing as much as $30 billion a year to U.S. agriculture. About a third of U.S. crop production relies on bees for pollination.
But these workhorses of agriculture are dying at unsustainable rates, triggering concerns in farming circles and beyond. Bees are considered an indicator species, and their decline signals broader systemic problems, environmental scientists say.
It’s a welcome summer sight: butterflies fluttering from flower to flower. But we could be seeing less of them. A study released today points a finger at road salt.
According to the study, researchers from University of Minnesota found butterflies that were fed a high-sodium diet only had a 10 percent survival rate, compared to a 40 percent to 50 percent survival rate for butterflies that were fed low-to-medium sodium diets.
Two environmental groups filed a notice of intent to sue the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today over its failure to protect the monarch butterfly under the Endangered Species Act.
The Center for Biological Diversity and Center for Food Safety petitioned for the monarch’s protection in August 2014, following a more than 80 percent decline in the butterfly’s population over the past two decades. In December 2014 the agency issued an initial positive decision on the petition and launched an official review of the butterfly’s status.
Recently Dr. Gary Paul Nabhan and I attended several meetings in Washington D. C. as part of a February leadership initiative for “Make Way for Monarchs – A Milkweed-Butterfly Recovery Alliance.”
Immediately prior to journeying north from Asheville, and about the same time the monarchs in Mexico were about to journey north…
Kansas University’s Monarch Watch effort is getting more than half a million dollars to enable a butterfly version of the old “teach a man to fish” proverb.
The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation announced Monday that Monarch Watch would receive $527,154 for its “Building Tribal Capacity for Monarch Habitat Restoration” project. Roughly half the money is coming from the Wildlife Foundation and half from matching funds, including donations from Monsanto.
Every year a generation of monarchs reach the forests of Mexico’s Michoacan region. The 2,800-mile journey south from the U.S. takes four generations of monarchs in a single year.
Millions of the butterflies turn the forest orange as they wait out the winter for six to eight months.
In 1996, World Wildlife Fund Mexico counted almost a billion monarch butterflies overwintering in the mountain forests of that country. By 2014 the number had plummeted to just 57 million, a decline of almost 94 percent.
The numbers were even lower the year before when only 34 million monarchs migrated to Mexico.