| Over the past 20 years notable decreases in monarch butterfly populations have led researchers to begin evaluating the landscape for changes and seeking out opportunities for enacting conservation programs to better support their survival. The monarch butterfly has recently come under consideration for listing under the Endangered Species Act that has created a need for a more informed view of the landscape through which they migrate and breed, the central United States. In this research three spatially-explicit models are explored using the most applicable datasets currently available to address pressing policy and land manager decisions regarding monarch butterfly and pollinator conservation. Using the Cropland Data Layer (CDL) and National Land Cover Data (NLCD), individually and combined, annual and decadal landscape change is evaluated, from 2008 -- 2017. The CDL and NLCD both present unique data integration challenges for reliably estimating land use change on an annual basis for all land cover types, and for augmenting additional feature data, such as soil productivity and transportation networks that represent valuable target areas for monarch and pollinator research. The results from these spatially-explicit model trials demonstrate a more informed process for quantifying uncertainty and moving toward thoughtful inclusion of CDL data in annual change metrics that identifies land conversion for a broad number of categories, including grassland/pasture. This work highlights a more consistent and transferable process for addressing policy and land manager decisions regarding monarch butterfly and pollinator conservation delivery. |
