ArticleNature ecology & evolution2021
Changes in climate drive recent monarch butterfly dynamics.
Article in Nature ecology & evolution, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed.
- Migrating in a Warming World: A Deep Learning Approach to Predict Pan-American Seasonal Shifts in the Monarch Butterfly Niche.Global change biology · 2026Article
- Eastern North American Monarch Butterfly Conservation Needs and Opportunities: What the Science Tells Us.Insects · 2026Review
- Article
- Twenty years (2000-2020) of butterfly monitoring data across the contiguous United States.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Impact of climate change on the habitat range of monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus).Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Three decades of declines restructure butterfly communities in the Midwestern United States.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- The impact of temperature on the reproductive development, body condition and mortality of autumn migrating monarch butterflies in the laboratory.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Protected area coverage of the full annual cycle of migratory butterflies.Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · 2025Article
- Distribution patterns and environmental factors influencing Nymphalidae and Salticidae diversity in the Wuzhishan area of Hainan.iScience · 2025Article
- Implications of summer breeding phenology on demography of monarch butterflies.The Journal of animal ecology · 2025Article
- Trans-Saharan migratory patterns iniScience · 2024Article
- Artificial intelligence correctly classifies developmental stages of monarch caterpillars enabling better conservation through the use of community science photographs.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Deep learning resilience inference for complex networked systems.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Dramatic recent declines in the size of monarch butterfly (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Changes in landscape and climate in Mexico and Texas reveal small effects on migratory habitat of monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus).Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Article
- The genome and sex-dependent responses to temperature in the common yellow butterfly, Eurema hecabe.BMC biology · 2023Article
- Body mass index does not decline during winter for the sedentary marine gastropodBiology letters · 2023Article
- Life cycle complexity and body mass drive erratic changes in climate vulnerability across ontogeny in a seasonally migrating butterfly.Conservation physiology · 2023Article
- Dynamics of stored lipids in fall migratory monarch butterflies (Conservation physiology · 2023Article
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9 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Declines in the abundance and diversity of insects pose a substantial threat to terrestrial ecosystems worldwide. Yet, identifying the causes of these declines has proved difficult, even for well-studied species like monarch butterflies, whose eastern North American population has decreased markedly over the last three decades. Three hypotheses have been proposed to explain the changes observed in the eastern monarch population: loss of milkweed host plants from increased herbicide use, mortality during autumn migration and/or early-winter resettlement and changes in breeding-season climate. Here, we use a hierarchical modelling approach, combining data from >18,000 systematic surveys to evaluate support for each of these hypotheses over a 25-yr period. Between 2004 and 2018, breeding-season weather was nearly seven times more important than other factors in explaining variation in summer population size, which was positively associated with the size of the subsequent overwintering population. Although data limitations prevent definitive evaluation of the factors governing population size between 1994 and 2003 (the period of the steepest monarch decline coinciding with a widespread increase in herbicide use), breeding-season weather was similarly identified as an important driver of monarch population size. If observed changes in spring and summer climate continue, portions of the current breeding range may become inhospitable for monarchs. Our results highlight the increasingly important contribution of a changing climate to insect declines.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.