WELCOME!
If you are reading this, then you probably have an interest in the monarch butterfly - the most well-known, iconic butterfly in the world.
This blog site was created with the goal of connecting the people who do the research on monarchs with those who watch them, care for them, participate in citizen-science programs on them, create gardens for them, and especially for people who have a desire to expand their knowledge of them.
Essentially, what you will be reading are blogs written by a scientist with 25+ years of experience researching monarch butterflies. You'll hear about recent projects from the lab, new papers that just came out, or something in the news about monarchs. Importantly, every effort will be made to boil down the research, data, graphs, etc, into user-friendly, everyday people-speak. NO SCIENTIFIC JARGON!
From reading these posts, you'll hopefully get an inside look into the inner-workings of a monarch researcher - their inner desires, their hopes for the monarch, their setbacks with their work, and the things you never hear about when you read the scientific papers or the news articles.
About the author:
Andy Davis is a research scientist at the Odum School of Ecology in the University of Georgia - link to the Davis lab website here. Andy has been studying monarchs, especially their amazing migration since 1997, and was the editor-in-chief of a scientific journal devoted specifically to animal migration. Andy is the author or coauthor of 35+ scientific studies on monarch biology.