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A female monarch feasts on common milkweed in the Charlotte area. Photo credit: Angel Hjarding/North Carolina Wildlife Federation (NCWF).

Monarch butterfly sightings are being reported across the Piedmont. It’s one stop along the way in their journey from as far north as Canada to Mexico. This annual, multi-generational migration is one of nature’s greatest phenomena, but it’s also in peril. Over the past two decades, the monarch’s population has declined by more than 90 percent.

Fall migration monarch. Photo credit: Angel Hjarding/NCWF.

Scientists the world over are working to understand why, and, hopefully discover ways to reverse this troublesome trend. A small team of researchers, students and designers in the Triad are leading the charge, and they’re doing so using lasers.

At the Center for Design and Innovation in Winston-Salem, a captivating image practically leaps off a large desktop computer monitor: a pine-oak forest, high in the mountains of Mexico; each towering tree trunk adorned with thousands of monarch butterflies; the branches weighed down by enormous insect clusters; clouds of orange, white and black.

WSSU research assistantGeorgina Dzikunu displays 3D visualization in progress.DAVID FORD/WFDD

Only, upon closer inspection, the realization sets in: they’re not real. They’ve been digitized—every leaf, twig and butterfly antenna a perfectly rendered 3D visualization.

Winston-Salem State University professor and lead researcher Nick Hristov will explain how it’s accomplished, but first, he’s interested in reflecting on just why we should care so much about these tiny creatures.

“They’re just gorgeous,” he says. “Look at the wings and the light interacting with them.”

Hristov says twenty years ago, nearly one billion monarchs completed their 2,000-mile migration. Today that number has dropped to about 150 million. They face several risks: climate and rainfall pattern changes impact the timing of migration. As forests are cleared for farms and new construction, they're losing habitat. And their primary food source, milkweed, is under assault from pesticides.

And further complicating recovery efforts is the fact that these little guys are difficult to count.

“There’s many of them. They’re tiny. They fly in complicated ways and pretty much push every technical capability that we have,” says Hristov.

Throughout their research, the Light Detection and Ranging system or LiDAR has been an indispensable tool. It’s a common surveying system used since the 60s for mapping topography, but Hristov was the first to employ LiDAR for modeling butterfly behavior.

WSSU assistant researchers Georgina Dzikunu (foreground), and Zariah Jean share data with lead researcher Nick Hristov (center). DAVID FORD/WFDD

The machines use a pulsed laser light to measure distances, recording more than a million data points every second, scanning monarch habitat with the butterflies, and without them. The difference between the two scans represents the volume of the insects there.

Hristov says the next challenge, is formulating accurate butterfly number counts.

“Considering how few are left, if we really want to have impact with the policies and corrective measures that we’re putting in place, we need to be able to work at a finer, more detailed level of number estimation,” Hristov says. “We can’t wait ten years to see whether the many trees are covered again.”

And that’s where the magic happens. Once that data has been collected, analyzed and processed, it arrives at the desk of 3D artist Dennis Nikolaidis. He’s the CEO of Animusing Productions, a visual content and development company.

“I’m trying to create 3D models out of those point clouds, just points floating in mid-air, millions of points,” says Nikolaidis.

3d model of butterfly clusters in progress. DAVID FORD/WFDD

Nikolaidis says it’s an added challenge separating clusters of thousands of butterflies from the foliage immediately surrounding them.

“So, what we’re trying to do is find the right algorithms that can process those points and create a 3D model out of them.”

Assisting him is WSSU undergraduate Georgina Dzikunu. She’s spent months processing millions of flat, one-dimensional scans, and lining them up perfectly to create 3D visualizations. Jean says creating them is really cool, but it’s not exactly fun and games.

“It’s so much pressure, because they’re gonna be using your data,” says Jean. “But the enjoyable part of it is when you create it and it’s like, ‘Oh, you’re good. Good job.’ It’s like yeah, it’s rewarding.”

Butterfly Highway pollinator pitstop at First Ward Park in Charlotte, NC. Photo credit: Angel Hjarding/NCWF.

What’s also rewarding for Dzikunu and her fellow researchers is that the data they generate may one day help other organizations boost monarch populations, like the Butterfly Highway project in North Carolina.

After determining how much land remained in the urbanized area around Charlotte to support butterflies and other pollinators, founder Angel Hjarding first began encouraging residents there to fill in the gaps with sustainable perennial gardens for pollinators. Today, with the support of the North Carolina Wildlife Federation, it’s become one of the fastest growing wildlife conservation programs in the state.

“Now we’re closing in on almost 2,000—we refer to them as pollinator pit stops—because it’s more than just gardens,” says Hjarding. “It’s providing a habitat weigh station, or pit stop, for pollinators such as monarchs as they travel through the Carolinas which they’re doing now.”

Hjarding says she and her members have been reporting many more monarchs this year. That’s good news, but too soon to tell if their work or the data that supports it is the reason behind the surge. Either way, one thing’s for sure, the work to preserve and to count them continues.

CORRECTION: An earlier web post included the wrong name of the WSSU research assistant quoted for this story. The correct name is Georgina Dzikunu and not her WSSU colleague, Zariah Jean.

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Loveland, Colo., resident Mary Pullen (left) and her son Nick Balla plant milkweed near the Big Thompson River as part of a community campaign to restore milkweed in the area.

Luke Runyon/KUNC and Harvest Public Media

Monarch butterflies are disappearing.

Populations of these distinctive black and orange migratory insects have been in precipitous decline for the past 20 years, but scientists aren't exactly sure what's causing them to vanish.

So far, potential culprits include disease, climate change, drought and deforestation. Everyone from loggers to suburban developers has been implicated. But much of the blame has been placed on farmers and the pesticides they rely on — pesticides that have reduced the milkweed that monarch caterpillars feast on. Now, however, scientists say that may not be the full story.

Every spring, hundreds of thousands of monarchs sweep across the Great Plains from Mexico to Canada, and then back again in the fall. It's an amazing journey, one that takes place over multiple generations for the butterflies. The insects breed while traveling north, expending four generations to make it to Canada. The final generation then flies all the way back to Mexico to spend the winter there.

Monarch populations are measured in hectares (roughly 2 1/2 acres). Surveys of their wintering habitats in the central mountains of Mexico show dense populations of monarchs at an average of more than nine hectares during the winters from 1995 to 2002. In 2014, monarchs took up less than one hectare.

Since the late 1990s, scientists have been trying to find the pinch point for monarchs: the spot along their migration where they run into trouble.

"Monarch caterpillars feed exclusively on milkweed plants, so people always thought that the decline in milkweed is causing the decline in monarch butterflies," says Hidetoshi Inamine at Cornell University, a doctoral student in evolutionary biology and ecology.

Milkweed is actually a class of more than 100 varieties of leafy green plants, so named for the milky sap that oozes from its stem when snapped. It's literal lifeblood for the monarch caterpillars, serving as the insect's sole food source early in its life cycle. But since the plant serves no utility for Midwest farmers, it is often plowed under, pulled out or blasted with herbicides.

However, so far, according to a recent National Academy of Sciences report on genetically engineered crops, scientists haven't been able to prove that disappearing milkweed is causing the caterpillars to starve.

And Inamine's recent paper suggests that declining milkweed may not be the biggest threat to monarchs.

He and a team of researchers found that most of the monarch decline is happening when the butterflies turn around in Canada to head back south, no longer reliant on milkweed. Fully grown butterflies feed on other plants, especially flowers laden with nectar. With some nectar-bearing plants also on the decline, Inamine says that could be a far greater threat to the mature butterflies than the decrease in Midwestern milkweed.

Still, Inamine notes, "we don't know what's causing the decline per se." Studies suggest that a combination of factors — including habitat fragmentation, severe weather, climate change, disease and deforestation — could be to blame.

Even if milkweed isn't the likely bottleneck, scientists say planting more of it could give populations a boost as they travel north across the Great Plains.

That's led community groups, conservation activists and government grants to make their way into rural America, determined to slowly reshape the Great Plains in the hope that more milkweed means more butterflies.

Bob Trout is one of those volunteer leaders. He's the head of the Loveland Initiative for Monarch Butterflies, out of Loveland, Colo. On a windy, rainy spring morning, he was decked out in a bright orange jacket, working along the banks of the Big Thompson River. Trout is a big fan of monarchs.

"They are gorgeous. They are just absolutely gorgeous butterfly caterpillars," Trout says. "And the chrysalis — with the jade green with the gold dots around the rim — is just fantastic-looking."

He's in charge of a team of volunteers, here to plant the edges of small ponds and the river's banks with milkweed. Volunteers use hammers and stakes to make holes in the hard-packed soil.

"We're trying to save the migration is what we're trying to do," he says.

Trout mentions the use of glyphosate, more commonly known as Roundup, the ubiquitous herbicide sold by agrochemical giant Monsanto, as a possible cause of monarch decline. Studies have shown milkweed abundance declined by 58 percent from 1999 to 2010. Without milkweed, Trout says, how are monarchs to flourish in a crucial migration corridor?

There's still "no consensus among researchers that increased glyphosate use is not at all associated with decreased monarch populations," according to the NAS report.

In the interim, some of the largest agrochemical companies in the world are stepping up to incentivize farmers to not only plant milkweed, but keep butterfly habitat from fragmenting even further.

Monarch caterpillars feed exclusively on milkweed.

Ellen Woods/Courtesy of Cornell University

"We always look for simple solutions or simple blame," says Caydee Savinelli, pollinator stewardship lead for the agrochemical giant Syngenta.

Savinelli is part of a group of conservationists, ag companies and farm groups trying to restore and protect some habitat in the Midwest to provide both more milkweed and more nectar plants for monarchs as they migrate north and south. She says farmers are receptive to keeping more butterfly habitat intact, but it has taken some convincing.

"In the case of milkweed, after telling them for the past 30 years, 'You need to eliminate it,' now we're saying, 'Bring it back.' So there's going to be some learning, for sure," Savinelli says.

Back on the banks of the Big Thompson River in Loveland, Colo., Mary Pullen and her son Nick Balla are pulling tiny milkweed plants from their containers and planting them in the ground.

"I'm not going to be able to go out and fight the big agriculture concerns," Balla says. "But if there's a little corner where it would be deemed effective to plant milkweed and that could possibly help, then great."

While scientists argue about where and when monarchs are being hurt during their migration, Pullen will be doing her part to help the migratory butterflies.

"It's a very small thing," she says. But, "it could end up being a big thing with a lot of people doing little things."

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Luke Runyon reports for Harvest Public Media and is based at member station KUNC in Greeley, Colo.

Copyright 2016 KUNC-FM. To see more, visit KUNC-FM.

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