I’ve been participating in monarch community science for the past few years.
Journey North Monarch Butterfly Sightings: This is the simplest project. We started reporting our sightings in 2013, the year the numbers of monarchs plummeted.
The Journey North project is simple, but important. I just note on the website when I see a monarch and submit a photo if I managed to get one.
Here are some other projects we’ve participated in:
In July 2022, we’re starting to participate in the Monarch Rx project.
Here are some of the plants I looked at to see if the monarchs use them.
I’m watching common boneset, late boneset, wild ageratum and joe-pye to see if any monarch uses them as they dry up.
Amazingly, it worked! A monarch actually visited these dead and dying plants and stayed a while. Here are some photos.
Resources
- Monarch Joint Venture:
- CitSci.org:
Reflections
Understanding which regions along the monarch’s migratory path are important to population viability and what environmental factors drive their movement can inform effective conservation strategies. Citizen scientists are key to this insight … the numbers are clear: Many questions critical to our understanding of monarch biology are basically impossible to answer without citizen scientists.
~ Leslie Ries and Karen Oberhauser, BioScience, a peer-reviewed science journal