Giving Compass' Take:
- Riya Anne Polcastro spotlights the Butterfly Pavilion, a nonprofit invertebrate zoo working with the Mexican government to replant trees for monarch butterflies.
- What is the role of donors in supporting the flourishing of the North American monarch butterfly population and other endangered species by ensuring that their habitats are protected?
- Learn more about key issues facing climate justice and how you can help.
- Search our Guide to Good for nonprofits focused on climate justice in your area.
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The number of eastern monarch butterflies that spend winters in central Mexico is down more than 80 percent compared to the 1990s, according to the conservation nonprofit Xerces Society. The Butterfly Pavilion — a nonprofit invertebrate zoo in Colorado — and the Mexican government are working to revive the population by replanting trees for monarch butterflies where they wait out the winter season.
In a forested, mountainous region northwest of Mexico City called the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, the effort will plant 100,000 oyamel fir trees, which the butterflies rely on to stay dry and maintain their body temperature during the winter months.
“It's such a powerful partnership,” Shiran Hershcovich, lepidopterist manager at Butterfly Pavilion, told TriplePundit. “It's a species that crosses countries and ignores our artificial borders.”
The Great Monarch Migration
North American monarchs are known for their extensive migrations, with those born east of the Rocky Mountains traveling up to 3,000 miles from Canada and the United States to central Mexico, National Geographic reports.
“They have these ancestral migration routes that they have been following for countless generations, so they follow wind patterns, and they orient themselves with the angle of the sun and even the magnetic fields of the Earth,” Hershcovich said. “They're using all of these very complex conditions to guide themselves and reach, every year, the richly scented oyamel forests.”
But monarchs face a host of threats along that journey, including shrinking overwintering sites as parts of the oyamel forests are lost to things like legal and illegal logging and the effects of climate change. Last year, the winter butterfly count was just under 1 hectare (2.2 acres), 59 percent lower than the year before, according to an annual population survey. Due to the large number of monarchs concentrated in one space, they cannot be individually counted and are tracked by the space they take up instead, Hershcovich said.
Read the full article about replanting trees for monarchs by Riya Anne Polcastro at Triple Pundit.