Folks,
If you did work in 2023 or 2024 for the Butterfly Altas, we really need you to report your hours by following the directions below. This allows the state to get funding for projects like this. Without a match, the Federal government gets the money back. If you can do it before Monday, I can okay it and it counts for the fiscal year. Thanks for all you do!
Kent
Log Your Volunteer Hours for Conservation Funding
Established in 2000 by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, State Wildlife Grants (SWG) provide money to states, territories, commonwealths, and others to address wildlife conservation needs such as research, surveys, monitoring, and species and habitat management. Projects focus on Species of Greatest Conservation Need identified in each State Wildlife Action Plan. The Vermont Butterfly Atlas has been an integral project for these plans and is partly funded by SWG. The 2015 plan included 16 butterfly species as Species of Greatest Conservation Concern. The third update to the plan is due in 2025 and we’ll be helping complete it once again using data from this atlas.
Here’s where we need your help. The state must match the federal funding. The good news is that your efforts with the Second Vermont Butterfly Atlas count as in-kind match! You can help match funding by logging into an online portal and entering your survey hours and mileage. Please consider taking the time as soon as you can to help unlock these conservation dollars.
You will first need to gather all of your atlas hours and mileage for each date. This would include any time traveling to a site, surveying butterflies, and entering data or even helping to identify other users observations. The easiest way to start is to visit your e-Butterfly.org account and collect all the dates and hours you were surveying, visit https://www.e-butterfly.org/ebapp/en/checklists/mychecklists. This may take a bit of time and your best estimate of hours each day is all that is needed, but the reporting requires your sign-off and then our approval too. Once you have all your data, you then sign into the reporting portal the state has created and add all of your information. Visit this link to see the illustrated steps and start adding yours too!