Citizen Scientists Are Helping Butterfly Monitoring Take Flight in the Heart of Boston
Citizen Scientists Are Helping Butterfly Monitoring Take Flight in the Heart of Boston
Citizen Scientists Are Helping Butterfly Monitoring Take Flight in the Heart of Boston
Halfway through her Boston University PhD program studying mimicry in butterflies—how their wing patterns evolve to avoid predators—Abby Robinson started to miss being outside in nature. A lot of her work was focused on lab research and data analysis, and she “wanted to reconnect with her love of nature and her love of butterflies.”
To get back to observing butterflies in the wild, Robinson (GRS’26) reached out to the conservancy that runs the Rose Kennedy Greenway, a 17-acre downtown Boston public park. By studying butterflies there, she hoped to better understand how the insects adapt to city living.
The Greenway is a linear park that occupies land once dominated by an elevated highway—now buried in tunnels—that cut through downtown Boston.
“It’s been really cool to work in a park that is prioritizing ecological horticulture,” says Robinson. “They’re right in the city, about as urban as you can be in Boston, but we have this pretty large meadow whose purpose is to be a pollinator habitat. You don’t get a lot of spaces like that in dense urban areas.”
At first, it was just Robinson walking around the park herself a couple of times a week, documenting the butterflies she saw. Since then, she’s worked with the Greenway to expand the research beyond a solo effort, growing it into a citizen science program, where anyone can sign up to track population levels and migratory patterns.
Volunteers get trained on how to conduct a survey, which involves walking the park and taking pictures or video of the butterflies they see in each section; they can go whenever they want, as long as they’ve been trained for the program.
“A lot of people will do a survey every day over their lunch break,” says Robinson. “We have a lot of people who work right around the park that do this. Or you could come every Saturday and do it. You can make your own schedule with it, which is really nice.”
For Avery Morgan, the Greenway Conservancy’s volunteer and stewardship manager, one of the best parts of the program is how it appeals to people of all ages. She says it’s exciting to watch volunteers develop an interest in butterflies and the importance of pollinators to urban environments.
“You can invite so many more people to participate in something that has such strong potential to be impactful for the park and for downtown long term,” says Morgan. “Beyond the fact that we’ve been able to work with a wide variety of downtown office workers and retired folks, we’ve also been able to engage youth in the program.”
Robinson hopes that the butterfly monitoring program exists beyond her time in Boston, making science straightforward and easily accessible to anyone who is curious about the creatures and habitats that also call their city home.
“I just believe that any living organism has a right to exist. Butterflies have always lived in Massachusetts, and we built these urban spaces and ruined a lot of their habitat,” says Robinson, who graduated this year and is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Rowland Institute at Harvard. “Doing what we can to create spaces in cities that are good habitats for these organisms is just good.”
In the video above, watch as Robinson leads a group of citizen scientists to observe butterflies around the Greenway.