Allianza Mariposa Monarcha is a group of University students from Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico, who promote environmental education and conservation efforts in Northwest Mexico. They began as a group that monitors butterfly migrations, most notably the Monarch. They still do trips through out the year to monitor areas where the monarchs travel and feed on their native food source, desert milkweed. On Saturday, May 13th, the Allianza Monarcha visited the NCI Eco club and presented for PolinizAmigos project. They presented on pollinators, monarchs, and native plants. Then we did a hike with the students and played nature "lotteria" with cards they brought. The Allianca Monarcha is one of the leading environmental education and monitoring groups in Sonora.
Valeria Cañedo, the group's director states, "Alianza Mariposa Monarca is a group of volunteers from the Sky Island Alliance working in Mexico with the conservation of the Monarch butterfly, made up of students of the Bachelor of Biology of the University of Sonora and students of the Ecology degree at the State University of Sonora . We work with monarch butterfly conservation with various activities such as biology, ecology and conservation of this insect at all levels of education, we also monitor in Sonora due to the lack of information it has on the migratory phenomenon of the Monarch butterfly In the state, with that reason that aims to create a scientific article where the migratory route is verified and thus to be able to create programs of conservation knowing its route by Sonora.
Our objectives are monarch butterfly and milkweed monitoring in Sonora, dissemination with environmental education and propagation of native plants to eradicate invasive plants. We have been working for about a year and have taken over 600 people in the state of Sonora, found 5 of the 15 species of Asclepias, and 54 monarch butterflies "