Monarch Butterfly Population Rejuvenated After Last Year’s Record Low

University of Arizona researchers are playing a leading role in an unprecedented effort to save America’s most iconic butterfly, the monarch.

Due to loss of habitat for milkweed – the sole food plant of the caterpillars – populations of this important pollinator have plummeted in recent years, leaving the monarch in dire straits.

Monarch butterflies, which pollinate many different kinds of wildflowers, are among nature’s great wonders. Their annual migration is one of the most awe-inspiring on Earth: Each fall, millions of these striking black-and-orange butterflies take flight on a 3,000-mile journey across the U.S. and Canada to wintering grounds in Mexico’s Sierra Madre mountains.

The monarch population, which is determined by measuring the number of hectares the butterflies occupy in their Mexico habitat, has declined to 2.48 hectares—almost 30 percent less than last year’s population.

Everyone is talking about the record low count of monarchs at their overwintering site in Mexico, but what does the science say is happening to them and why does it matter?

Monarch butterflies have a special place in the North American imagination. They are beautiful, plentiful, and have a legendary predator-repelling capacity.

The annual migration of the monarch butterfly is one of the great wonders of nature and contains as many mysteries as it does marvels.

Every fall, monarchs migrate across the continent in advance of the cold winter months. Those east of the Rocky Mountains fly to Mexico where they cluster by the millions in the Oyamel fir forests: a mere 12 mountaintop sanctuaries that shelter the overwintering monarchs.

The MJV brings together numerous conservation, research, and educational programs along with their respective resources in a coordinated effort to conserve monarch butterflies and their amazing migration.

Recently, the Monarch Joint Venture welcomed the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) as a partner to strengthen monarch and pollinator conservation throughout their networks and programs.

  A recently published analysis of data on tagged monarch butterflies migrating from the United States to Mexico emphasizes the…

“This changes everything”–the line that Donald Trump stole from Naomi Klein (who referred to climate change, not emails) can only be authentically used in relation to one amazing news story this week: The front page Sunday NY Times article by Danny Hakim “Doubts About a Promised Bounty: Genetically Modified Crops Have Failed to Lift Yields and Ease Pesticide Use.”

A national wildlife group awarded $3.3 million in grants Monday in its initial push to stem the worrisome decline of monarch butterflies, hoping the effort helps restore as much as 33,000 acres of habitat for the black-and-orange insect.

The 22 grants announced by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation will be matched by more than $6.7 million from the recipients, who are in more than a dozen states and among 115 applicants for funds in the conservation effort launched earlier this year.

This is a wonderful 14 minute video with Chip Taylor, Carol Davit and others on monarchs’ future. We recommend this Newsy Documentary.

Iowa is taking a big step to help the recovery of monarch butterflies. The Iowa Monarch Conservation Consortium on Feb. 27 released a statewide strategy to support monarch butterfly populations in Iowa and North America.

This insect is an important pollinator of plants and crops. The 135-page plan can help farmers, backyard gardeners and others with a road map for boosting monarch butterfly habitat.

One afternoon last March, on a small vegetable farm that Paul Kaiser runs in a particularly chilly valley in Sebastopol, California, a group of agriculture specialists gathered around a four-foot steel pole.

The experts had come to test the depth and quality of Kaiser’s top-soil, and one of them, a veteran farmer from the Central Valley named Tom Willey, leaned on the pole to push it into the dirt as far as he could.

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…

In light of the severe decline of both the eastern and western monarch butterfly populations that has occurred since the late-1990s, we are writing to ask you to establish a multi-agency monarch butterfly recovery initiative to restore the habitats that support the extraordinary migrations of this iconic species.

We encourage you to direct the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), Farm Service Agency (FSA), and Forest Service (USFS) of the U.S. Department of…

The news was already bad. Really, really bad.

Monarch butterflies that alight from Mexico and fly across the United States to Canada are being massacred. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service laid out a grim statistic in February: Nearly a billion have vanished since 1990…

The actions of ordinary people are often absent in studies of urban renewal and urban ecology. Around the world, people who are fed up with environmental degradation and the breakdown of their communities come together to transform blighted vacant lots, trashed-out stream corridors, polluted estuaries, and other “broken places.”

Civic ecology practices—such as community gardening, wetlands restoration, river cleanups, and tree planting…