Following the dramatic decline of both Eastern and Western North American migratory monarch populations over the past 20 years, the monitoring and protection of the butterfly’s breeding, nectaring, and staging habitat throughout the Canadian range was identified as a conservation priority in Canada. In this regard, long-term surveys in protected areas (such as the counts of migrating and roosting monarchs that took place on the Long Point peninsula, Pelee Island and Point Pelee National Park within the Lake Erie-Lake Ontario Ecoregion) and the contribution of community science programs (such as Mission Monarch) have provided useful, yet spatially biased data.
To optimize monarch research and conservation efforts, the Government of Canada (through the Federal Department of Environment and Climate Change), mandated Montréal Space for Life (through the Mission Monarch program), to design a monitoring protocol and sampling grid largely inspired by the Integrated Monarch Monitoring Program (IMMP) but adapted to the Canadian context. Therefore, thanks to the new Expert component of the Mission Monarch program (Mission Monarch - Expert), Canada now has a standardized monitoring program that can be used by conservation professionals and skilled community scientists to collect geographically and ecologically representative data that integrates monarch habitat and monarch use data into a unified dataset compatible with the IMMP.
