Evaluating the Suitability of Roadway Corridors for Use by Monarch Butterflies (2020)

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15 Meetings The research team held two project annual meetings. First was the kick-off meeting (April 2017) with the research team and several advisors, incorporating both in-person and call-in participation. In March 2018, the second annual meeting included the research team, research advisors, and advisory panel. Participants included 25 in-person attendees with an additional six people calling in. In each of the annual meetings, the team determined priorities for the next year of the project. Team members also attended various professional meetings throughout the course of the project and presented ongoing work and engaged in outreach. Participation in meetings opened communication with transportation departments, environmental organizations, and academics, giving invaluable input to the project. Team members also attended meetings of The Rights-of-Way as Habitat Working Group, a forum that meets twice a year, bringing together professionals from the transportation and energy sectors who share an interest in managing ROWs for habitat. Many of the participants in this group are focused on providing pollinator habitat, particularly for the monarch butterfly, in part because of its pending status under the Endangered Species Act. Here are some specific meetings where team members spoke about this project: • Wendy Caldwell—presented preliminary project details at the Rights-of-Way as Habitat Working Group, May 2017 • Alison Cariveau—included project within the Monarch Science Update at the Minnesota Pollinator Summit, September 2017 • Emilie Snell-Rood—spoke on “Potential for adaptation of pollinators to roadside habitats: effects of sodium and heavy metals” (related project) in a symposium on “Behavioral and physiological adaptation to urban environments.” Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, January 2018 • Alison Cariveau—presented “Monarchs and Roadsides: A Research Update.” The Rights- of-Way as Habitat Working Group, April 2018 • Jennifer Hopwood—presented “Merging Roadside Management and Pollinator Conserva- tion,” AASHTO Committee on Maintenance Annual Meeting, July 2018 • Lauren Agnew (graduate student, Snell-Rood Lab)—spoke on the “Nutrition of roadside plants for pollinators” (related project) at the Minnesota Pollinator Summit, September 2018 • Alison Cariveau—presented “Roadside Habitat for Monarchs: Tools for Managers” at the Monarch Joint Venture Annual Meeting, November 2018 • Tim Mitchell (postdoc, Snell-Rood Lab)—spoke on the “Nutrition of roadside plants for pollinators” (related project), University of Minnesota Center for Transportation Research Annual meeting, November 2018 C H A P T E R 2 General Research Approach

16 Evaluating the Suitability of Roadway Corridors for Use by Monarch Butterflies • Jamie Pavona (Delaware DOT)—presented poster “Monarch Butterfly Rapid Assessment on Delaware’s Roadsides,” Transportation Research Board meeting, January 2019 • Jennifer Hopwood—included project in Best Management Practices for Pollinators training, Colorado DOT, May 2019 Webinars Throughout the course of the project, the team engaged with its advisory council, research team, and a growing number of interested parties, particularly state departments of transporta- tion, through several webinars. These were opportunities to share progress on the project and to obtain feedback on various components of the team’s work. Three webinars about the project were given: • Project Update Webinar—October 2018. • Landscape Prioritization Model—May 17, 2019. • Roadside Monarch Habitat Evaluator—May 28, 2019. Survey of Transportation Managers To guide the design of this project, the researchers surveyed transportation managers to learn about their interest in pollinator habitat programs, their information needs, and the personnel resources that may be dedicated to habitat assessment. The team created a 30-question survey about desired management tools in Qualtrics that were distributed to a network of roadside management authority representatives via email. (The survey was reviewed by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at the University of Minnesota and determined not to constitute human subjects research, therefore not requiring IRB approval.) The survey included questions about existing pollinator habitat programs and what types of information would be helpful for plan- ning or implementing these programs. The team included questions on the availability of data about factors that could influence pollinator habitat quality, including noxious weeds, salt appli- cations, mowing regimes, and herbicide applications. The survey also inquired about interest in tracking management practices. The survey captured information about personnel resources available for conducting habitat assessments, including the number of people and number of days they could spend assessing habitat and the expected skill levels of the personnel relative to assessing habitat. Answers were mostly categorical with some free response. Survey results are reported in Chapter 6. User Profile Interviews The research team became interested in gaining more in-depth information from managers who were already involved in pollinator habitat management within ROWs. The team selected several managers to interview to learn about their data and decision-support needs to aug- ment the more general information gained from the Qualtrics survey. The researchers were also interested in fine-tuning the design of the RA and Habitat Calculator. In the winter of 2018, researchers interviewed four roadside managers with the following profiles: • Rob Roman (Roadside Manager, Engineering and Secondary Road Department, Linn County, IA)—Piloting a program to identify 1,000 miles of roadside for establishment and management of milkweed habitat. • Kayti Ewing (Botanist, Environmental Division, Arkansas DOT)—Maintains 1,000 miles of “wildflower routes,” consults with landowners to install pollinator habitat on adjacent road- sides through the Operation Wildflower program, and is working with District staff to identify

General Research Approach 17 areas where they can plant pollinator habitat and mow only once in the fall. Also working towards a Candidate Conservation Agreement with Assurances (CCAA) with the USFWS. • Dan MacSwain (Natural Resources Coordinator, Washington County, MN)—Negotiated a new rule to limit mowing/haying of roadsides in the county by adjacent landowners. Consults with engineers on seed mixes and revegetation designs. • Stephanie Dobbs (Roadside Manager, Illinois DOT)—Implementing a reduced mowing program along roadside ROWs statewide. Planning to actively manage and monitor the center median of I-39 for monarch habitat to meet CCAA requirements. Reviewing Existing Tools and Protocols When developing the RA protocol, the researchers reviewed existing assessment tools and monitoring programs (Table 1). There are no other published RA methodologies for mon- archs or for pollinators in roadsides. The most similar protocol was the Monarch Habitat Quantification Tool (Environmental Defense Fund et al. 2017), which is not rapid (i.e., requires a substantial time commitment), but can be used in roadsides. It includes milkweed and nectar plant quantification but does not contain other factors that researchers determined to be important in rating the suitability of monarch habitat in roadside ROWs, including the management factors of mowing and pesticide application as well as threats from invasive, non- native plant species. The researchers reviewed pollinator scorecards and pollinator habitat rating systems. Review was conducted in collaboration with the Rights-of-Way as Habitat Working Group (Energy Resources Center, University of Illinois-Chicago; http://www.erc.uic.edu/ biofuels-bioenergy/pollinator-habitat/rights-of-way-as-habitat/), and the Metrics and Targets Taskforce (A. Cariveau, co-chair). The research team also sought consistency with large-scale monarch monitoring programs: Monarch Larva Monitoring Project (www.mlmp.org) and the Integrated Monarch Monitoring Program (IMMP) (www.monarchjointventure.org/IMMP) (Cariveau et al. 2019b). Name of Assessment Tool Name of Organization Solar Site Pollinator Habitat Assessment Form for Project Planning Minnesota Board of Water and Soil Resources Monarch Breeding Habitat Assessment Tool University of Minnesota Monarch Lab Pollinator Habitat Site Evaluation Rubric Pollinator Partnership Native Bee Conservation Pollinator Habitat Assessment Form and Guide The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation Pollinator Habitat Assessment Form American Transmission Company Solar Site Pollinator Habitat Planning and Assessment Form (for site and seed mix planning/designing) Pollinator-Friendly Solar Initiative of Vermont Rusty Patched Bumble Bee Habitat Assessment Form and Guide The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation Idaho Pollinator Habitat Assessment Form The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation Farm Management Assessment Guide Bee Better Certified- Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation Monarch Habitat Quantification Tool Environmental Defense Fund, Environmental Incentives, University of Minnesota Monarch Lab The Pollinator Site Value Index (PSVI) Hubert A. Allen, Jr., Michael R. Haggie, and Richard A. Johnstone Application for Pollinator-Friendly Garden Certification Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences Center for Pollinator Research 2018 Project Scoring Sheet, Pollinators Wildlife Habitat Council Table 1. Pollinator or monarch habitat assessment tools reviewed.

18 Evaluating the Suitability of Roadway Corridors for Use by Monarch Butterflies The research team began by reviewing the Environmental Defense Fund’s (EDF) Monarch Habitat Quantification Tool (HQT) (Environmental Defense Fund et al. 2017, Anderson et al. 2017). The HQT describes habitat quality, including threats, based on the best available science regarding species’ habitat needs, combined with habitat quantity to compute “functional acres.” The purpose of the HQT was specifically to support the rating of habitat enrolled in the Monarch Exchange. While the intent of this research project is quite different, the process of assembling a habitat quality calculation tool is very similar. This research intent is to provide roadside ROWs managers with the ability to score areas within their ROWs in terms of habitat quality for monarchs. In interviews with transportation managers and background research, the research team identified important factors in roadside ROWs that were not incorporated in the HQT. In particular, the HQT does not include measures related to road characteristics, threats by invasive non-native plant species (weeds), or mowing and herbicide application practices that are commonly applied in the roadside corridor. Therefore, the team designed a data collection protocol, the RA, that would provide data for all these additional factors, then designed the Monarch Habitat Calculator to seamlessly incorporate these data inputs. Expert User Testing To further refine the tools, the research team knew it would be important to engage directly with several state departments of transportation to verify the Landscape Prioritization Model and field test the RA and Habitat Calculator. The researchers worked with representative users from the Illinois, Minnesota, and Wisconsin departments of transportation. The researchers arranged times to visit in-person during the summer of 2018 (Figure 6). These visits entailed first a demonstration of the Landscape Figure 6. Conducting user testing of the Rapid Assessment with the Wisconsin Department of Transportation.

General Research Approach 19 Prioritization Model for their state and then selecting sites to field test the RA protocols. The research team selected high-quality sites, such as prairie remnants, as well as sites where restoration activities had been completed, to gain further feedback and refine the protocols and range of data that would be encountered. The team then went into the field with DOT teams to collect data using the RA, and then those data were put through the Habitat Calcu- lator. These same states were also asked to download and run the scripts for assembling and running the Landscape Prioritization Model for their states within their state GIS system. In addition to these visits, the research team engaged significantly with the state of Delaware, which completed a statewide inventory of monarch habitat in their state-managed roadside ROWs in 2018. The team cooperated by providing the Landscape Prioritization Model, RA, and prototype of the Habitat Calculator. They successfully profiled more than 100 sites and presented their findings at the National Meeting of Transportation Managers in January 2019. Field Testing with Biotechnician Crews The researchers employed field crews in Minnesota and Oklahoma to inform protocol devel- opment for the RA tool, to provide data inputs to calibrate the Habitat Calculator, and finally, to test the final version of the RA and Habitat Calculator in 2018. Field study objectives included: • Learn about the feasibility and challenges in running the protocol, • Record how long it took to conduct surveys, • Obtain data to calibrate the Habitat Calculator, • Collect monarch use data and compare it to habitat data, • Validate data collected by these methods by comparing data collected by other protocols, and • Learn about the importance of landscape in the quality of habitat and the use by monarchs. To calibrate the RA protocol, the research team collected data from the same roadside sites using both the RA protocol and other more intensive protocols. In Minnesota, at a subset of sites, data were taken using the IMMP protocol for comparison to the RA methodology. Specifically, the researchers compared results from the RA to those from the IMMP for milk- weed densities, nectar plant species richness, and monarch observations (eggs and larvae). The team was interested in whether both protocols yielded similar estimates for these key metrics and whether there was a correlation of measures between the two. In Oklahoma, additional and comparative data were collected according to protocols of the Oklahoma State University research team (Kristen Baum, Oklahoma State University, unpublished data). Between 2017 and 2018, modifications were incorporated to the RA protocol, based on feedback from the field experience, examination of the data collected, input from advisors to the project, and additional input from roadside vegetation managers through the survey. More about the data collected in field work is detailed in Chapter 4. The research team developed the Roadside Monarch Habitat Calculator in parallel with the RA. The team designed the Habitat Calculator in the Esri Survey123 environment as many depart- ments of transportation already use Esri products, and programming may be done to auto- matically calculate data from the RA to generate a Monarch Habitat Quality Score for each assessed ROW site. Based on factors thought to be important in defining monarch habitat quality along roads, the team grouped data measures under four functional components of habitat: breed- ing, foraging, landscape context and threats, and management. Function and measure weights were determined by the team through meetings and discussions regarding the relative importance of various habitat components. For each measure represented in the Habitat Calculator, the team developed point distributions (0–100 for each measure) to correspond with various levels in the scores. The development of scoring for each functional area is explained in Chapter 5.