From 2003 to 2019, amateur butterfly enthusiast Harlan Radcliff spent his lunch breaks observing butterflies on the grounds of the Camp Dodge military installation in central Iowa.
Over those years, between the months of April and November, Radcliff meticulously recorded the dates, times, locations and numbers of the butterflies he spotted, creating a dataset that made it possible for a Montana State University ecologist to pinpoint how climate variations have affected the migratory patterns of Camp Dodge’s monarch butterfly population in the 21st century. The results are published in the Journal of Animal Ecology.
Diane Debinski, professor and head of MSU’s Department of Ecology in the College of Letters and Science, is the lead author of the paper, which details the findings of research she led at Camp Dodge in the core of the eastern monarchs’ summer breeding range. The work was part of a larger study of the effects of climate change on three ecologically significant species of butterflies that use Department of Defense lands and whose populations are declining…