Tracking Monarchs With Arizona Lottery Gives Back Support
- Insights Press
- 29 minutes ago
- 2 min read
PHOENIX (April 9, 2025) – Desert Botanical Garden is making exciting strides in monarch butterfly research thanks to a generous partnership with the Arizona Lottery Gives Back program. This year, the Garden is enhancing its efforts to track and understand monarch migration patterns in Arizona.
Monarch butterflies are present in the Garden from September through May, but their migration routes remain largely a mystery. While it’s known that some monarchs travel through Phoenix on their way to overwintering grounds in Mexico and California, others remain in the Valley and the low deserts of Arizona and California during the winter months.
“We really want to know how long monarchs live and what their behavior and movement patterns are, especially in the winter months in the low desert,” Garden Plant and Insect Ecology Program Manager Natalie Melkonoff said.
A better understanding of monarch movements will allow conservationists to implement more effective conservation strategies at the right time and place. To assist in this critical research, a new solar-powered radio tag has been developed for monarchs using Bluetooth technology. These tags can be tracked using the Project Monarch app on smartphones.
With funding from the Arizona Lottery Gives Back program, the Garden acquired 50 tags, enabling the tracking of monarch butterflies as part of a collaborative research project with Southwest Monarch Study. The Arizona Lottery Gives Back program supports conservation efforts across the state, with proceeds from ticket sales directly benefiting environmental initiatives.
Visitors to the Garden’s Spring Butterfly Exhibit may even spot some of these tagged monarchs through May 11. This research will help inform strategic conservation efforts, ensuring monarchs have the right resources in the right places at the right times.
Since 2016, The Garden has been working to study and conserve monarch butterflies. The Garden grows thousands of native milkweeds (the obligatory hostplant for monarch butterflies) and nectar plants for monarchs and other pollinators each year and conducts research to further understanding of how to create the best monarch habitat in the Southwest and how habitat may change in the future under extreme heat or drought.
Learn more information about Desert Botanical Garden’s monarch research, or to learn how you can help support conservation efforts.
To download the Project Monarch app, visit:
About the Arizona Lottery
Since 1981, the Arizona Lottery and its retail partners have generated more than $5.6 billion in net funding to support programs that help to improve the quality of life for the people of Arizona. Proceeds from Lottery ticket sales fund programs in higher education, economic development, environmental conservation, and health and human services. The mission of the Lottery is to support Arizona programs for the public benefit by maximizing net revenue in a responsible manner. Learn more at ArizonaLottery.com. To learn more about the AZ Lottery Gives Back Program, visit ArizonaLottery.com/GivesBack.