Remember the Monarchs (Montréal, QC): How Mission Monarque Mobilizes Citizen Science for an Endangered Species in Quebec

Introduction

Every summer, across the fields and roadsides of southern Quebec, a quiet tragedy plays out on the undersides of milkweed leaves. A few decades ago, countless milkweed leaves carried the eggs of a migratory phenomenon spanning three nations. Now, many of those leaves are bare of a migratory phenomenon spanning three nations, now there is stillness, deserted leaves, with no sign of life that once was so plentiful. The monarch butterfly is now officially classified as endangered in Canada [1]. This Community Knowledge Publication (CKP) profiles Mission Monarque, a Quebec citizen science program working to ensure that the monarch's story does not end.

Mission Monarque is a joint initiative of the Insectarium de Montréal (part of the Espace pour la vie) and the Institut de recherche en biologie végétale (IRBV). Launched in 2016, its mission is to gather data on monarch butterfly reproductive success and milkweed distribution across Canada by mobilizing volunteers of all ages and backgrounds to survey milkweed patches, document monarch eggs and caterpillars, and submit their observations to a national scientific database [2]. The data collected feeds directly into the Trinational Monarch Knowledge Network (TMKN), which is an open-access database assembling monarch and milkweed observations from Canada, the United States, and Mexico [3]. Since 2016, Mission Monarque has grown into one of Canada's most important breeding-season monitoring programs, as well as its professional counterpart, Mission Monarch Expert (MMx) [4].

This CKP does two things. It documents the challenges facing the monarch in Quebec, the communities touched by its decline, and what Mission Monarque is doing about it. But it also makes an argument that programs like Mission Monarque are not just conservation tools. They can help young people deal with eco-anxiety by turning their worry about climate change into something actionable. In its most pure form, this is true environmental activism.

Background: Key Local Challenges

The Collapse of the Monarch Population

The eastern monarch butterfly population has experienced one of the most intense declines of any insect species in North American history. A decade of monitoring showed the severity of this decline with the area occupied by overwintering monarch colonies in central Mexico peaked at 18.19 hectares in the winter of 1996-1997 and fell to a record low of 0.67 hectares in 2013-2014, a drop of more than 80% [5]. Because monarch population size is estimated by multiplying occupied hectares by a density figure, and density estimates ranging from 6.9 to 60.9 million butterflies per hectare, while exact population counts remain uncertain, the scale of loss is not in dispute [6].

The causes of the monarch's decline are complex, but research points to several converging forces that intensified in the mid-1990s. A major study in Royal Society Open Science found that from 1993 to 2014, monarch population size was strongly negatively associated with glyphosate use, and some links to overwinter forest loss and neonicotinoid use during the breeding season [7]. The spread of herbicide-tolerant corn and soybean crops in the late 1990s sharply increased glyphosate use across the agricultural Midwest, the core of the monarch's breeding area. As a result, milkweed, the monarch's only host plant for egg-laying and caterpillar development, declined severely. Over two decades, an estimated 850 million milkweed plants disappeared from corn and soybean fields, removing 71% of the species' breeding support capacity [9]. Another study based on museum records suggests that monarch and milkweed declines may have begun as early as the 1950s, driven in part by postwar agricultural intensification, with the glyphosate era accelerating an already existing trend [10].

In Quebec, four native milkweed species grow, with common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) the most abundant and the primary host for breeding monarchs [11]. The loss and crumbling of milkweed habitat in agricultural and urban landscapes across the province directly reduces the reproductive ability of the population that passes through Quebec each summer. A 2022 study sampling 45 soybean fields across Quebec found that 91% of soils contained detectable levels of glyphosate or its metabolite AMPA, including fields under organic management where herbicides had not been applied, suggesting pervasive contamination of the agricultural landscape in which monarchs breed [26].

Climate Change and Migration Disruption

Climate change adds a second level of complexity to the survival of an already vulnerable species. The monarch's annual migration depends on precise environmental conditions, including temperature, daylength, and the availability of nectar plants along a route stretching from Quebec to the Oyamel fir forests of Michoacán, Mexico [12]. Disruptions to any of these conditions can be deadly for the monarch. Severe weather events, such as ice storms have killed millions of monarchs [8]. Looking closer to home, rising temperatures have exacerbated the plight of the monarch. A 2026 field experiment at the northern edge of the breeding range in Ottawa found that even a modest increase in temperature degrades the nectar monarchs rely on during fall migration, leaving them with significantly smaller fat reserves to fuel their journey to Mexico [32]. Along the monarch's migratory route, shifting precipitation patterns alter the timing and availability of wildflowers that the adult monarchs depend on for energy. During the breeding season of the monarchs, rising temperatures can accelerate the milkweed's phenology, creating critical time gaps between when monarchs arrive and when suitable host plants are available for their egg-laying [13].

For young people in Quebec, the monarch's decline is a visible form of environmental loss, marked by noticeably fewer butterflies each summer. Residents who grew up in the 1980s often remember monarchs as a familiar backyard sight; today, many young Quebecers have never seen one in the wild. This shift reflects the reality of eco-anxiety, a chronic emotional response to environmental degradation that is rising among youth worldwide [14].

A 2025 randomized controlled trial involving 86 secondary school students in Ireland examined whether a nature-based intervention, combining weekly online climate education with a supervised ecological field trip, could strengthen climate capability and reduce eco-anxiety [15]. The intervention group showed a mean 8.2-point increase in climate capability scores compared with controls, along with higher levels of productive eco-anxiety, the form that encourages action rather than paralysis [15]. The trial demonstrated convincingly that when young people are given practical ways to respond, anxiety can shift from helplessness to engagement. A 2024 Quebec-based cluster randomized trial similarly found that a school-based nature intervention reduced emotional distress among 515 elementary students across the province [28]

Mission Monarque's monitoring protocol is built around exactly this kind of hands-on, nature-based work. Participants locate milkweed, check it for monarch eggs and caterpillars, record their observations, and submit the data to a shared research database. If a supervised ecological field trip could shift Irish students from the feeling of helplessness toward productive eco-anxiety, and a school-based nature program could ease emotional distress among Quebec elementary students, then sustained participation in citizen science monitoring raises a parallel possibility in that hands-on conservation work of this kind functions as its own form of intervention, not only documenting the monarch's decline but also offering young volunteers a constructive outlet for eco-anxiety.

The Knowledge-Action Gap in Environmental Education

Another challenge is pedagogical. In Quebec, environmental education on climate change and biodiversity loss is still taught largely through what Paulo Freire called the "banking model" of education, in which knowledge flows mainly from teacher to student and students are cast as passive recipients rather than active participants in learning [16]. A 2025 study in Frontiers in Education highlights two related barriers that can weaken climate change education. Curricula are often poorly aligned with the socioecological realities of local communities, while lecture-based teaching limits opportunities for critical inquiry and practical engagement with local environmental issues [17].

Although the study examining this pattern was conducted in sub-Saharan Africa, its findings on the dominance of lecture-based climate education echo patterns documented closer to home. In Quebec specifically, Morin, Therriault, and Bader (2022) found that secondary school students confined to transmission-based climate education reported feeling powerless, while those given opportunities for authentic engagement developed a strong "sentiment de pouvoir agir", a sense of being able to act [21]. Read together, these studies suggest that the banking-model problem is not unique to any one educational context, but that its effects on youth agency have been directly observed in Quebec classrooms.

Climate change education scholars emphasize that effective programs must be personally relevant and involve students through approaches like hands-on projects, collaboration with experts, and meaningful discussion [18].

The students understand the science of climate change and biodiversity loss but lack a clear path to meaningful action. They might know that monarchs are disappearing, but they have no method through which their concern translates into impact.

A 2025 research report on climate change education and the knowledge-action gap found that passive learning had no statistically significant impact on pro-environmental behaviour, while active and participatory learning approaches, particularly those combining education with community-based action, showed significant positive effects [19]. When students are not given the opportunity to engage in authentic inquiry, the science they learn feels abstract and unrelated to their lived experiences, creating a hurdle to engagement [20].

This is where citizen science comes in. Programs like Mission Monarque hand students actual scientific tools and ask them to go out and produce data that matters. Rather than a static classroom lesson, it is active and dynamic. Participatory theory suggests this approach works because it moves people from passive observation to action.

The Affected Community and Its Needs

The monarch butterfly's decline affects many communities in Quebec. In Quebec's ecosystems, the monarch butterfly is an indicator species, so its fate reflects the health of pollinator habitats, wildflower meadows, and agricultural margins that support hundreds of other species. However, the effects of its decline reach beyond Quebec's biomes and food webs.

Youth and Students

Young people in Quebec are disproportionately affected by the emotional facets of the monarch's population decline. Research consistently shows that eco-anxiety is most prevalent among youth, who are watching the consequences of climate change unfold in real time while feeling they lack the power to respond [14]. In Quebec, Morin, Therriault, and Bader (2022) found that school environments strongly shape young people's sense of empowerment, with students who are given trust, autonomy, and opportunities to act developing a strong sense of environmental agency, while those confined to passive, transmission-based learning feel powerless in the face of climate change [21].

These findings highlight that Quebec's youth are not simply anxious about the environment, they are asking for the tools and the agency to respond.

For students in particular, the monarch represents a tangible entry point into the otherwise often overwhelming reality of climate change. The butterfly's lifecycle is easily observable, its decline is measurable, and the actions needed to help, such as planting milkweed, surveying habitats, reporting data, are certainly within the capacity of a high school, university student, or even an elementary school child. Mission Monarque's protocol is designed for accessibility where no scientific background is required, and participants can survey a milkweed patch in a single visit [2].

In my correspondence with the Mission Monarque team, they confirmed that schools are encouraged to participate at any educational level and that teachers can be trained to guide students through the survey process. However, there is a misalignment between the monarch survey period, which happens in late June through August, and the Quebec youth sector school calendar. The program has explored school-based training in the past and remains open to finding models that work within the constraints of the Quebec school calendar. Addressing this gap, whether through spring preparation, fall data analysis activities, or integration into summer school or day camp programs, represents an opportunity to strengthen the connection between classroom learning and community-based environmental action.

Indigenous Communities

The monarch butterfly holds cultural significance for Indigenous peoples across its migratory range. The Purépecha of Michoacán and the Mazahua of Estado de México have tracked the movement of monarch, known as la parakata in Purépecha, for centuries [22]; in Purépecha, the monarch signaled the corn harvest and was believed to carry the souls of ancestors returning to visit the living for Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead [23].

Multispecies ethnographic research shows that the monarch connects distinct Indigenous care worlds across the continent, from amateur conservation communities in the North to Indigenous-mestizo forest communities in Mexico, each with its own valid relationship to the butterfly and its habitat [24].

In Quebec, published documentation of First Nations' cultural relationships with the monarch butterfly remains somewhat thin, a research gap that is itself significant. What is documented is active Indigenous participation in species-at-risk recovery in the province. In 2025, the Government of Canada announced $2 million in funding through the Indigenous Partnerships for Species at Risk program, including a project in Anishinabe territory to help protect monarchs among other species [27].

The absence of published research on Quebec Indigenous relationships with the monarch should not be mistaken for an absence of relationship. It signals, rather, that this is a space where future research, conducted in partnership with Indigenous communities, is needed.

Rural and Agricultural Communities

Quebec's agricultural communities are both part of the problem and part of the solution. Herbicide-intensive farming practices have driven milkweed loss which is, unfortunately, where monarchs breed. Through the Species at Risk Act, the Government of Canada encourages farmers and rural landowners to adopt pollinator-friendly practices such as leaving field margins unsprayed, delaying mowing until after the breeding season (such as No Mow May), and establishing milkweed corridors along agricultural margins [1]. In Quebec specifically, Prime-Vert program subsidizes agro-environmental practices for agricultural businesses, covering large portions of eligible costs for projects including pesticide reduction and the adoption of mechanical weeding alternatives [30]. The Canadian Wildlife Federation also operates a Rights-of-Way Habitat Networks program that works with roadside and utility corridor managers in Quebec and Ontario to restore native meadow habitat for monarchs and pollinators along the St. Lawrence Lowlands [31]. These types of programs provide the institutional framework for change.

The affected community is not one single group. It is farmers, students, Indigenous nations, and entire ecosystems, all connected, in one way or another, to the milkweed patch and the butterfly that cannot live without it.

Mission Monarque's Programs and Initiatives Addressing Local Challenges

Mission Monarque: Citizen Science at Scale

Mission Monarque is one of the central leaders of monarch monitoring in Quebec and Canada. Its protocol is elegantly simple: participants find milkweed, record the number of monarch eggs and caterpillars observed (including zeros), and submit their data through the Mission Monarque website. Even finding no monarchs is scientifically valuable: understanding where monarchs are absent is as important as knowing where they breed [2]. Participants are encouraged to visit sites weekly during the breeding season (approximately late June through August), building a temporal picture of monarch reproductive activity across the landscape.

The program's public data explorer allows anyone to view all observations submitted since 2016, and it is filterable by province, life stage (eggs, caterpillars, chrysalis, adults), and milkweed species. This transparency is central to the program's ethos because the data belongs to the community that collects it. All observations feed into the Trinational Monarch Knowledge Network, an open-access database hosted by NatureCounts that assembles monarch and milkweed data from across North America, with over 248 million biodiversity records available for research and educational use [3].

In my correspondence with the Mission Monarque team, they offered several insights not visible from the program's public-facing materials. First, the program does not currently collect demographic information from participants beyond name, city, province, and preferred language, meaning that the age and background profile of the volunteer base is largely unknown (Mission Monarque, personal communication, May 2026). Among the program's top contributors, the team noted, an older couple ranked first and third in data volume, suggesting that dedicated long-term volunteers may contribute disproportionately to the dataset. The team indicated that collecting additional demographic information is something they are interested in exploring, which would allow for a better understanding of who participates and who remains unreached.

Second, the team described a pattern of "hot spots" and "cold spots" in the geographic distribution of observations. Because Mission Monarque is a community science program, participants tend to survey high-quality habitats where monarchs are more likely to be present, leaving habitats with lower expected monarch density underrepresented in the dataset. Observations are also concentrated near urban centres and disproportionately in Quebec, reflecting both the Insectarium's Montreal base and the program's stronger francophone outreach. A scientific team is currently working on a paper to more accurately identify and characterize these spatial biases (Mission Monarque, personal communication, May 2026). This matters for community mobilization because bringing in more participants from underrepresented rural areas, anglophone communities and places outside of Quebec could improve both the scientific value of the dataset and the reach of the program's conservation impact.

Third, the team emphasized a message they feel is underreported: that data collection itself is a foundational act of conservation. Gathering information on species distribution and abundance is one of the first steps in developing effective conservation strategies, as these data support scientific analyses and inform decisions about the most appropriate protective actions (Mission Monarque, personal communication, May 2026).

This point matters for the eco-anxiety argument in this paper. If a young person learns that just walking to a milkweed patch and writing down what they see counts as real conservation work, that changes something. If young people understand that visiting a milkweed patch, examining leaves, and recording what they do or do not see is a real contribution to species recovery, the gap between concern and action begins to close. In this way, the monitoring protocol offers a structured path from climate distress to environmental agency.

The team also flagged the issue of captive monarch rearing, a practice in which well-intentioned individuals raise monarchs indoors from eggs or caterpillars and release them. While motivated by care, captive rearing can have unintended negative consequences for the species, including reduced genetic diversity, increased disease transmission, and impaired migratory behaviour. Public awareness of these risks, the team noted, remains insufficient (Mission Monarque, personal communication, May 2026).

Viewed through the RE-AIM framework [29], Mission Monarque's strengths and limitations come into sharper focus. Its Effectiveness, the ability to generate scientifically valuable data, is well established through the TMKN and MMx. However, the hot-spot and cold-spot bias is a Reach problem, the school-calendar mismatch is an Adoption barrier, and the absence of demographic data leaves Implementation and Maintenance unmeasured. Mission Monarque's core protocol is very strong; its translation into broad community impact is where some structural barriers remain.

Mission Monarch Expert (MMx): Professional Monitoring

In addition to its citizen science program, the Insectarium launched Mission Monarch Expert (MMx), a professional monitoring protocol adapted from the U.S. Integrated Monarch Monitoring Program (IMMP) for the Canadian context. According to Greg Mitchell, a Research Scientist at Environment and Climate Change Canada, the program effectively removes the Canada-US border for monarch research by ensuring that Canadian data is fully compatible with American protocols and can be analyzed at the continental scale [4].

Unlike Mission Monarque's volunteer surveys, MMx uses a standardized professional protocol with randomly selected sites and repeated breeding-season visits, reducing urban and high-quality-habitat bias. In its pilot year, it trained 50 professionals from 15 organizations, showing why the citizen science protocol "only ever told part of the story" [4].

It is worth noting, however, that MMx does not address all the limitations identified in the citizen science program. The school-calendar misalliance remains, since MMx is a professional protocol, not an educational one.

AI Use

No AI tools were used in the research, drafting, or revision of this Community Knowledge Publication.