Field work through the smoke of the western wildfires

Northern Nevada hit hard by smoke for all of August

Aramee Diethelm, Sami Akiba and our amazing team of student workers (Ben Baker, Doug Collins) and post-bac Shannon Campbell have been studying milkweeds and monarchs through an unprecedented summer of wildfires in California. We’ve gotten smoke first from the Tamarack fire, then from the Dixie fire, and now from the Caldor fire. Most days the air quality has been “unhealthy” according to air-pollution metrics, and occasionally we’ve had visible ash flying through the air, landing on our clothes, our cars, our masks.

We’ve had two big monarch-milkweed focused projects happening this summer. First, Aramee has been conducting her long planned study of monarch predation across four common gardens spanning Davis, CA, to Austin, NV. This has been a heroic effort (there’s a reason that replicated common garden experiments are rare!) aided by the whole team and sustained by Aramee’s indefatigable pursuit of her question: how do host plant species and environmental context impact monarch development and predation risk? Given the conditions, the question about environmental context has a decidedly climatic angle: can the threatened Western monarch survive to continue its incredible migration from the California coast to the Great Basin in the face of near-constant heat waves and wildfire smoke? Stay tuned to see how these brave caterpillars have fared!

Second, Sami Akiba has been leading a survey of milkweed populations in Northern Nevada and in Inyo and Mono counties in California as part of a collaboration with the California Bureau of Land Management and its Field Office in Bishop. We have been excited to add many populations of rare and common milkweed species from the Bishop area and BLM lands to our network of monitored populations in the northern Great Basin. We are surveying population size, plant traits, and looking for use of these populations by monarchs.

Photo by Shannon Campbell