The world is losing its monarch butterflies. The biggest threat isn’t logging, herbicides and other human activities destroy natural habitats. It’s climate change.
As climate change threatens the habitats of migrating monarch butterflies, citizens and scientists in Mexico are taking a novel approach: planting new forests at higher altitudes.s a boy, Francisco Ramirez Cruz loved hiking with his grandfather up into the mountains of central Mexico.
On one of the scientists’ early scouting trips to the region several years ago, locals suggested they meet Ramirez, a respected farmer with graying sideburns and a thin mustache who lives on a windswept hillside in Ejido La Mesa, a community that overlaps with the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve — a national park 70 miles west of Mexico City.
Francisco Ramirez Cruz with an empty water collector on his family's ranch in Ejido La Mesa, Mexico. Climate change has meant the wet season is shorter and more brutal than in previous years, with a drier season that is even more dry.“In the early days, we didn’t know where they came from,” said Ramirez, who talks the way he moves — slowly and deliberately. “But we have always been so happy to see them.
The butterflies that winter here, known as eastern monarchs, seek sanctuary in the oyamel firs that tower in and around the reserve. Thousands of monarch butterflies cluster on the oyamel firs that tower in and around the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in Mexico. Over the last several years, the team of researchers has overseen the relocation of about 1,000 fir saplings that were growing at lower altitudes up to higher — and cooler — elevations.
In the middle of Ramirez’s orchard of apple and plum trees, the scientists helped him construct a small greenhouse, where he tends to several dozen saplings that were taken from the forest and will eventually be replanted. On a recent blustery morning, he watered the trees with a hose while listening to the sentimental ranchera songs drifting from the house of a nearby neighbor.
So-called assisted migration is happening in other parts of the world, including Canada, where commercial forestry operations have begun replacing dead lodgepole pines with a species of larch that grows at lower and drier elevations. Plant moving is controversial among some scientists, who warn of unintended consequences when humans intervene in nature’s course, but it is increasingly seen as a needed response to a rapidly changing climate.
As jobs dried up, many locals had to migrate, just like the monarchs do. That included two of Ramirez’s sons, who toiled for a time in the United States, and several other family members who still live there. In a small chapel his father built on the farm, Ramirez and his wife keep fresh flowers and a framed picture of Toribio Romo Gonzalez, a Catholic saint known as a protector of immigrants.
Francisco Ramirez Cruz waters Oyamel fir saplings maturing in a greenhouse on his family's ranch in La Mesa, Mexico.
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