By Alex Day, WNPF Marketing/Communications & Database Manager
The Cascades Butterfly Project has taken place for more than a decade, launching in 2011 to monitor butterfly abundance and plant phenology at ten survey sites in Mount Rainier and North Cascades National Parks and in the two adjacent national forests.
This project – made possible by donors to Washington’s National Park Fund – is a priority of the parks, as high-elevation ecosystems are especially vulnerable to warming climates since the plants and animals that call those ecosystems home are adapted to long winters and short summers with mild temperatures.
Both the National Park Service and the U.S. Forest Service are charged with the protection of natural ecosystems in perpetuity for the American public, and both rely on science-based management. Through this project, community scientists provide data that helps the parks to understand how pollinators are being influenced by warming climates.
Butterfly species abundance and composition, or the relative amount, are sampled using the Pollard Walk method, which breaks 1-kilometer-long routes into five 200-meter sections. Routes follow trails, to minimize impacts on soils and plants.
In each route section, volunteers walk slowly (in what’s called “the wedding march”) and visually identify and record the butterflies they see, as well as the timing of plant flowering. Occasionally, identification can’t be done visually, in which case butterflies are captured with nets, identified, and released unharmed. Volunteers team up into pairs, with one person monitoring and one person recording the observations using a log sheet provided by the Cascades Butterfly Project.
Alongside the valuable data the Cascades Butterfly Program volunteers collect, an equally important part of their service is helping to educate park visitors about what they’re doing – and why.
According to project lead and ecologist Regina Rochefort, Ph.D., “We try to get the word out that the park does science, and we want to protect the ecosystem. When visitors see you with the butterfly net and talk to you, that’s a great time to show them the butterfly in the jar – especially kids.” This educational opportunity can turn someone’s hike into an educational experience about pollinators and plant phenology, two early warning signs of the impact of climate change on sensitive ecosystems. Or in some cases, it can even attract new volunteers.
We try to get the word out that the park does science, and we want to protect the ecosystem.
Hundreds of people are reached each year through the Cascades Butterfly Project volunteers.
Now in its twelfth year, the Cascades Butterfly Project continues to grow and collect more and more valuable data for ecologists. Last year, all surveys were completed by the program’s 34 volunteers, including 12 first-time volunteers. Collectively, they contributed more than 1,500 hours conducting surveys. Since the program began, 57 of the 155 species of butterflies in Washington have been documented.
Volunteering with the Cascades Butterfly Project is a fantastic way to give back to the park and contribute data needed to monitor and measure changes in butterfly populations. And the best part? Anyone can do it.
On a warm weekday in July, I had the privilege of joining the Cascades Butterfly Project for the first of three volunteer training sessions taking place this summer. A group of 20 or so volunteers met at the Sunrise Rim trailhead in Mount Rainier, ranging from first-timers to 7+ year veterans and including some coming from as far away as Portland.
Over the course of the morning, the volunteers met each other, learned about the survey methods and gear, and participated in a survey with Regina, the project lead. Volunteers received hats, thermometers, nets, and butterfly identification cards (made available through contributions from Washington’s National Park Fund).
I asked a few how they had first discovered the program, and what motivated them to donate their time to this important research project. One volunteer, an entomologist by training, told me she first discovered the Cascades Butterfly Project through her daughter while looking for ways to give back – safely – during the pandemic. She appreciated that this program allowed her to get outdoors and give back in a meaningful way, a sentiment shared by many of the volunteers.
You don’t have to be an entomologist to be a Cascades Butterfly Project volunteer – one volunteer found the program while volunteering as a Meadow Rover at Sunrise, and another, a newly retired librarian, was simply looking for ways to give back while enjoying time in the outdoors and meeting other similarly-minded individuals.
If you’re interested in learning more about what it takes to become a community scientist volunteer, visit the Cascade Butterflies Project volunteer page for information on getting involved.
Or, consider giving a gift in support of the program.