Fwd: VT Butterfly Big Year
Rick Borchelt
From: Kent McFarland <kmcfa...@vtecostudies.org>
Date: Mon, May 9, 2016 at 4:02 PM
Subject: VT Butterfly Big Year
To: VTL...@list.uvm.edu
With the help of an army of citizen scientists, the Vermont Butterfly Big Year, a project of the Vermont Atlas of Life, aims to record every species of butterfly in Vermont this year. It’s a blend of science, education, competition, enjoyment, and a quest to monitor the changing nature of the state. Climate change, invasive species, habitat loss, and other environmental concerns are altering the biological diversity of Vermont. And with your help, VCE is trying to understand what this means for butterflies.
VCE biologist Kent McFarland led a six-year atlas of butterfly diversity across Vermont, involving hundreds of volunteers and producing a landmark report for the state in 2007. The Vermont Butterfly Survey, a project of the Vermont Atlas of Life, established a baseline accounting of butterfly distribution and abundance throughout the state.
“It has been almost a decade since the atlas,” said McFarland. “Atlases are typically repeated every 25 years, so we won’t have another effort like that until around 2027. But with eButterfly making the task much easier, we thought it was time to get a quick, one-year snapshot across the state.”
The Vermont Butterfly Big Year aims to get volunteers of all kinds to search fields and fens, mountains and meadows, even their own backyards, to help document every species of butterfly in Vermont and in as many locations as possible. Digital cameras and eButterfly make this mission easier for volunteers and our biologists. A real-time, online checklist program, eButterfly provides a new way for everyone to report, organize, and access information about butterflies in Vermont and beyond. Launched in 2013, eButterfly provides rich data sources for basic information on butterfly abundance, distribution,and phenology.
Butterfly watchers have already reported 14 species of butterflies on eButterfly. We hope you'll complete checklists of butterflies all season long in Vermont and add them to eButterfly. Perhaps you have some old haunts you can resurvey where you visited during the butterfly atlas? Or maybe some new habitats you want to check out. Even those fluttering around your yard are fair game. Help us get a snapshot of Vermont butterflies this year!
http://val.vtecostudies.org/projects/vermont-butterfly-big-year/
Kent McFarland
Vermont Center for Ecostudies
PO Box 420 | Norwich, Vermont 05055
802.649.1431 x2
College Park, MD
preferred personal email: rborchelt |AT| gmail |DOT| com
http://leplog.wordpress.com
Frank Boyle
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RichardHSmith
Rick, Frank,
It would be most convenient for people to do this sort of atlasing near to where they live. However, except for butterfly enthusiasts who live in Montgomery, Prince Georges (mainly College Park area), Howard, Harford, Frederick, and Garrett Counties, I am not aware of butterfly enthusiasts who are prone to go out and regularly inventory butterflies in their nearby natural areas.
Most people who do this across this state, for practical reasons, are only able to do it incidentally (I have been one of these, but not as much regularly in recent years).
Unlike with birding, I am not aware of the manpower currently in Maryland who could accomplish a comprehensive atlasing effort for butterflies. It might be possible to drum up enough volunteers, a successful example is what was done with the Maryland Amphibian and Reptile Atlas (MARA) project (http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijz/2012/348653/ . It was co-sponsored by the MD Department of Natural Resources and the Natural History Society of Maryland and took a large staff to organize, recruit volunteers in each county, and coordinate. I think MD DNR feels we know more about butterflies now than they did about herps in Maryland before MARA got underway, so there may be less support for butterfly atlasing from an organizational level. It’s probably more than I would want to bite off too. Currently, I just try to track species considered to be or possibly declining from information gleaned from the few enthusiasts who are very diligently out in the field all over the state watching and keeping copious notes.
Dick Smith
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Rick Borchelt
College Park, MD
preferred personal email: rborchelt |AT| gmail |DOT| com
http://leplog.wordpress.com
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