Monarch Butterfly Relevant Land Cover Data Set for the Conterminous United States of America

The USGS Upper Midwest Environmental Sciences Center developed a Monarch Butterfly Relevant Land Cover data set covering the conterminous United States of America. This data set was used primarily to assist in forecasting the number of milkweed stems on the landscape. Milkweed are required by monarch butterflies for reproduction and one possible cause for the decline in monarch butterfly numbers is thought to be the loss of milkweed. We used the Cropland Data Layer 2015 as well as additional spatially explicit information to develop the monarch relevant land cover data set. Additional sources of information included 2014 United States Department of Agriculture Conservation Reserve Program enrollment locations; railroad, power line, and road rights of way; marginal versus productive farmland as determined by the 2012 United States Department of Agriculture National Commodity Cropland Productivity Index; and a characterization of urban versus outside urban environs. Due to the inherent sensitivity of the Conservation Reserve Program and Transmission line data sets, we created this non-sensitive version of the Monarch Butterfly Relevant Land Cover data set for distribution with those two data sets not used in the development.