How Southern California naturalists are trying to save monarch butterflies

The Western Monarch butterfly is expected to go extinct by 2080, but a handful of Southern California naturalists are at the forefront of efforts to save the iconic insects.

Five scientists — a Pasadena resident and four who live in the Inland Empire — were chosen for a program aimed at helping the butterfly.

RELATED: Monarch butterflies to be listed as a threatened species in US

The program focuses on collecting, raising, testing and tagging the butterflies so scientists can better understand them.

“We know a lot about what affects them, but there’s still much more to learn — that’s what this program is for,” said Jenny Iyer, spokesperson for the Riverside-Corona Resource Conservation District, which has a naturalist in the program.

The initiative comes at a key time for the monarch.

Last month, federal wildlife officials proposed that the monarch be listed as a threatened species and be protected under the Endangered Species Act.

The Western Monarch, known for its striking orange and black wings, “has seen its population decline by more than 95% since the 1980s,” the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service said in a news release.

Survival rates depend on rainfall, temperature, and the availability of nectar plants and milkweed for egg-laying, the Portland-based Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation said.

The insect’s population drop results from habitat loss from urbanization, which reduces native milkweed plants — the only food source for monarch caterpillars. Pesticides used to control unwanted insect and plant species are another factor that negatively affect monarchs.

The five Californians were selected by the Southwest Monarch Study, a nonprofit organization that researches monarch migration in Arizona and across the southwestern United States.

The program’s data will help scientists determine the best breeding conditions and hopefully track more closely where the butterflies migrate, said Iyer, whose district’s naturalist Michele Felix-Derbarmdiker, is part of the effort.

This marks the first time the Southwest Monarch Study has received a state permit to do this type of work in California, Iyer said. Handling, tagging, or testing monarchs without a permit is illegal in California, Felix-Derbarmdiker said.

“The permit is not easy to acquire, so when this opportunity knocked, I jumped at it …” Felix-Derbarmdiker said.

The other Riverside County scientists and naturalists contributing to the study live in Palm Springs, Bermuda Dunes and Indio, said Southwest Monarch Study Coordinator Gail Morris, who declined to name them.

Kristy Brauch, an ecological educator and Pasadena resident of more than 20 years, was chosen for her prior experience with monarchs.

Brauch is part of UC Riverside’s Master Gardener Program, which promotes sustainable gardening and conservation of California’s natural resources.

“My dad is my favorite naturalist,” Brauch said, recalling how she spent many childhood days playing at monarch overwintering sites, which sparked her interest in the butterflies. “It’s something that stayed with me.”

Brauch is raising, testing and tagging butterflies for the program in Pasadena and at The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in San Marino.

She also facilitates public education on pollinators such as monarchs and bumblebees through workshops, outreach events and by managing a pollinator team.

Brauch educates people about pollinators such as monarchs alongside bumblebees and has contributed to the Monarch Larva Monitoring Project, which tracks breeding monarchs to support conservation efforts.

From 2009 to 2020, she participated in Monarch Alert, a citizen-based research initiative at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo focused on the population trends of western monarch butterflies in San Luis Obispo and Monterey counties.

“The work I’m doing now is about connecting with my community and sharing my experiences because I’ve witnessed the incredible decline in monarch populations,” Brauch said.

For the project, tagging a butterfly involves scientists attaching a small, heat-resistant blue sticker to its wing, so anyone who spots the insect with such a tag can email their sighting to tag@swtag.org.

Data collected by the public helps track the monarch population in real time and shows how weather extremes impact their life cycle, according to the Southwest Monarch Study’s website.

Currently, the monarch butterfly is not listed as threatened or endangered, Felix-Derbarmdiker said.

If the process proceeds as it should, the butterfly will be listed as federally threatened in December 2025, Felix-Derbarmdiker said.

The Endangered Species Act protects species listed as endangered or threatened. While it’s illegal to import, export, possess, transport or kill endangered species, there are exceptions for a species listed as threatened.

For example, the proposed listing would prohibit killing or transporting monarchs. However, people and farmers could still remove milkweed but can’t make permanent changes to their land that destroy monarch habitats.

Felix-Derbarmdiker was picked for the program because of her experience with monarch butterflies.

She helps manage 2 acres of monarch habitat in Riverside’s greenbelt, where staff and volunteers work together to plant, weed and monitor monarch activity.

In Riverside, the conservation district helped implement the Mayor’s Monarch Challenge in 2019, established the Mayor’s Monarch Garden at City Hall in 2022 and helped facilitate a pollinator garden at Ryan Bonaminio Park in the city.

Like Brauch, Felix-Derbarmdiker’s love for the environment started early.

“As a kid, I loved animals and being outside and as I got older and learned more about our environment and the harm humans were inflicting on the planet, I knew I had to be one of the protectors,” she said.

Protecting the environment is also a focus for her employer.

“Habitat restoration work is one of the things we spend a lot of our time doing here,” Iyer said.

“We also plant native milkweeds for monarch caterpillars in natural sites around the Inland Empire,” Iyer said.

While Western monarchs are known to migrate to California’s coastal forests for winter, several monarchs were released in Riverside in fall as part of the program to track where they go.

Felix-Derbarmdiker, who at first worked with birds and reptiles, never imagined her career would shift to insects.

“It has been challenging but rewarding, and I would do it all over again,” she said.

The conservation district encourages anyone who spots a monarch with a sky blue tag to report it by emailing tag@swtag.org.

A photo is preferred but not required. Live or deceased monarchs can be reported, along with the tag number, date, location, weather conditions and contact information for the person reporting it.