Surveying Monarchs and Bumble Bees to Inform National Park Conservation
This summer, I have been helping lead a pollinator inventory with the National Park Service at Whiskeytown National Recreation Area and Lassen Volcanic National Park in northern California. Working with National Park Service staff and researchers at UC Davis, we are conducting repeated surveys of monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus), bumble bees (Bombus spp.), and the plants they use. The goal is to establish a baseline of which pollinator species occur in the parks, when they are active across the season, and which habitats and floral resources they use.
I helped develop the project proposal and budget, refine the survey protocols, and coordinate with National Park Service staff before heading into the field. The project has also expanded my own field experience beyond monarchs. I learned standardized walking surveys for bumble bees, in which observers move through flowering habitat while recording and identifying the bees encountered, as well as bumble bee field identification. We also record which flowering plants bees visit, allowing us to examine how pollinator communities and their use of floral resources change across sites and through the season. The project pairs these bumble bee surveys with repeated surveys for monarch breeding. We search milkweed (Asclepias), the plant monarch caterpillars feed on, for eggs and caterpillars and record other immature stages, including pupae, when encountered.
An especially important part of the project for me has been mentoring a postbaccalaureate researcher while we work together throughout the field season. Because we are collecting data for both monarch and bumble bee components of the project, our time in the field has created opportunities to talk through why we collect particular kinds of data, how individual observations connect to larger ecological questions, and how those data will eventually be used in analyses and management decisions. I have particularly valued being able to share the parts of research that are less visible than field methods themselves: how projects develop from a proposal, how collaborators divide responsibilities, and how ecological questions are translated into work that can be useful to conservation practitioners.
The resulting inventory will give Whiskeytown and Lassen baseline information about their monarch and bumble bee communities and the habitat resources that support them. These data can help inform decisions about restoration, invasive species management, and vegetation and fire management within the parks. For me, the project has also been an opportunity to combine research leadership, mentorship, and applied conservation while expanding my own experience with a new pollinator system.
