Here's a cool synthesis paper using data from the Integrated Monarch Monitoring Program (IMMP). The headline conclusion is that ROWs had the most milkweed plants:
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| Site Type: ACL, Agricultural Conservation Land; DEV, Developed; PGS, Protected Grassland; ROW, Rights-of-way; UGS, Unclassified Grassland. |
However, this paper excludes Asclepias subverticillata (and A. verticillata), the most common milkweed species in our area. Apparently this was so they could apply their total stems to the work of Thogmarten et al that calculated how many stems of milkweed are needed to support stable monarch butterfly populations. But, since the main results of this paper compare milkweed plants between different site and habitat types, they should at least show what this analysis would look like with A. subverticillata.
Actually, most of the paper's results are focused on Eastern U.S., and there is a companion Western paper forthcoming, but that is not obvious from the Abstract. So excluding a common western milkweed plant may not have changed most of the results.
What's also not obvious is that none of the figures show actual data, they only show the model results derived from the data. Apparently that is how ecology works now-a-days: create some kind of bespoke complicated statistical model and don't even bother to plot the underlying messy real-world data...
Citation
Front. Ecol. Evol., 23 May 2024
Sec. Conservation and Restoration Ecology
Volume 12 - 2024 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2024.1330583
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