Helpful “How-To” Scenarios

Finding a site with milkweed is the first step in participating in the MLMP and often the trickiest for many volunteers. This page provides more details about how to define your site.

This is a classic problem in monitoring for the MLMP. Fortunately, there are several examples of sub-sampling techniques that you can use to shorten your weekly monitoring while still collecting quality data.

You are not required to monitor all of the milkweed species at your MLMP site. This page describes options for determining what is best.

If you’re an avid monarch raiser, you know that it can get complicated caring for numerous individuals and keeping them all straight for your MLMP reports (Activity 3, Estimating Survival). Here are our suggestions for organizing them.

It can sometimes be difficult to tell if a milkweed is one plant or more than one. This scenario outlines how to define one milkweed plant, either with many stems originating from a central point or as many above-ground stalks, called ramets.

If you're only seeing certain stages of monarchs, you might be missing the others. Here are some tips for ensuring that you are finding all of the stages on the milkweed plant.

It is recommended by the Monarch Joint Venture to cut tropical milkweed back every fall. Tropical milkweed is commonly grown in gardens and you may be monitoring it as part of your MLMP site, so should you cut it back? This scenario will help you decide.

If you have a lot of milkweeds or a large area to monitor, you may wonder how you avoid recording the same plant twice as you either go through your systematic sampling or transects. This scenario provides some tips on how to avoid this.

MLMP monitoring with kids can be fun and exciting. This scenario outlines two different situations to guide you when monitoring with children.

Depending on where your MLMP monitoring site is and who owns/manages it, you may not always have control over what happens there. Regardless of the nature of the disturbance, if something happens at your site that changes the structure or composition of the vegetation there (mowing, spraying, etc.), we want to know about it.

This question is a frequent and important one. Please keep monitoring even when you don’t find monarchs -- be a hero and report your zero! Here are some of the reasons why.

As a trainer for the Monarch Larva Monitoring Project, providing participants with the best possible materials and guidance is key to their success. While having living monarchs makes it easier to demonstrate differences between larval instars, this is not always possible.

Here are some tips for raising monarchs safely for Activity 3: Estimating Monarch Survival. These tips can also be applied when rearing other insects.