Joan Mosenthal DeWind was an early member of the Xerces Society and a keen supporter of getting young people involved in invertebrate conservation. In her memory, her husband Bill DeWind established a student research endowment fund, which is administered by the Xerces Society.
Western monarch researchers and community scientists have been busy, contributing information vital to understanding the situation facing this imperiled population.
We need all hands on deck this season, to better understand the hurdles facing the imperiled western monarch population!
Helping the monarch back to full health isn’t going to be easy or quick, but together we can transform the landscape to allow the monarch to rebound—and give our children the gift of watching orange wings flap in the sunshine.
While hiking in California and the rest of the West, you can help researchers by submitting any and all monarch and milkweed observations this year to the Western Monarch Milkweed Mapper website.
Overall, the count data revealed an average decrease of 38% between the Thanksgiving and New Year’s counts.
We urge you to join us and our colleagues in the western monarch science and conservation community in taking meaningful, swift action to help save western monarchs.
What can you do to help the monarch? Protect habitat, avoid pesticide use, plant gardens, and contribute data to Xerces-led community science efforts.
The growing season may be winding down, but fall is an important time to create habitat. The work you do now will help support overwintering pollinators and the next generation of bumble bees.
October’s featured staff hail from Oklahoma, California, and Nebraska, and have been providing workshops for the public, planning pollinator habitat for arid agricultural areas, and assessing the success of pollinator plantings.
Instead of rearing—which is risky and unproven in helping monarchs—we should focus on more effective, science-backed ways to conserve these glorious wild animals.
A new guide to protecting the monarch butterfly from the Pacific to the Rockies presents a holistic approach to monarch conservation.
Milkweed is in demand, and that demand has been filled in recent years by tropical milkweed, a non-native species. But is planting tropical milkweed potentially doing more harm than good?
A new study from the USGS, Univ. of Arizona, and partner organizations finds 1.3 additional milkweed stems are needed in the Midwestern U.S. to recover monarch butterfly populations.
