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Karen Oberhauser

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Migratory species may provide more ecosystem goods and services to humans in certain parts of their range than others. These areas may or may not coincide with the locations of habitat on which the species is most dependent for its continued population viability. This situation can present significant policy challenges, as locations that most support a given species may be in effect subsidizing the provision of services in other locations, often in different political jurisdictions. The ability to quantify these spatial subsidies could be used to develop economic incentives that internalize the costs and benefits of protecting migratory species, enhancing cross-jurisdictional cooperative management. Targeted payments...
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The Eastern, migratory population of monarch butterflies ( Danaus plexippus), an iconic North American insect, has declined by ~80% over the last decade. The monarch’s multi-generational migration between overwintering grounds in central Mexico and the summer breeding grounds in the northern U.S. and southern Canada is celebrated in all three countries and creates shared management responsibilities across North America. Here we present a novel Bayesian multivariate auto-regressive state-space model to assess quasi-extinction risk and aid in the establishment of a target population size for monarch conservation planning. We find that, given a range of plausible quasi-extinction thresholds, the population has a substantial...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
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Migratory species provide ecosystem goods and services throughout their annual cycles, often over long distances. Designing effective conservation solutions for migratory species requires knowledge of both species ecology and the socioeconomic context of their migrations. We present a framework built around the concept that migratory species act as carriers, delivering benefit flows to people throughout their annual cycle that are supported by the network of ecosystems upon which the species depend. We apply this framework to the monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) migration of eastern North America by calculating their spatial subsidies. Spatial subsidies are the net ecosystem service flows throughout a species’...
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We studied the direct and indirect impacts of using fire and grazing to manage remnant prairies on adult monarch abundance. This dataset consists of data collected at 10 burned and 10 grazed remnant Minnesota prairies during the summers of 2016 and 2017. We measured Asclepias spp. (milkweeds, monarch host plants) frequency, forb frequency, and adult monarch butterfly abundance at sites owned and managed by the Minnesota DNR, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, The Nature Conservancy, and private landowners.
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The first monarch citizen science program was launched in the 1950s and, since then, thousands of volunteers have made fundamental contributions to our accumulating knowledge of monarch biology. We quantified these efforts and the degree to which citizen science has contributed to monarch scholarship. We estimate that, in 2011, volunteers spent over 72,000 hours collecting data useful for monarch research. Of 503 monarch-focused research publications in which new results were presented from 1940 to 2014, 17% used citizen science data. We address persistent gaps in the use and coverage of these data and show that, despite a typical view of volunteers as mere data collectors for scientists, many citizens are deeply...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
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