Project Wingspan

Project Wingspan: Landscape Enhancement for Imperiled Pollinators of the Midwest (PW) set out to increase the quality, quantity, and connectivity of monarch, rusty patched bumble bee, and other imperiled pollinator habitat throughout eight states within the Midwest and Great Lakes region through a highly collaborative, innovative model that approached the deficit of this crucial habitat on the landscape by addressing two of the major roadblocks many projects face: the shortage of commercially available regionally appropriate plant materials and the knowledge of programs, practices, and support that can help land stewards on their habitat journey. Through this initiative, Pollinator Partnership (P2) in collaboration with our diverse project partners successfully facilitated the continued growth of a regional seed collecting program for PW by holding a series of 7 in-person seed collection training workshops and an online training module. This resulted in 413 trained seed collection volunteers who completed over 505 seed collections of native milkweed and other target pollinator supporting (host, nectar, and pollen forage) plants across our target region, producing 195 lbs. of cleaned seed of which a portion enabled the successful grow out of 16,962 plugs. With the use of our novel online habitat survey, P2 was able to identify thousands of landowners and managers interested in pollinator conservation across AR, IL, IN, MI, MO, OH, PA, and WI and conducted 48 in-person and virtual site visits to provide habitat evaluations, consultation, and obtain long-term management commitments. This survey and the associated site consultations allowed us to widely distribute information about habitat planning resources and locate habitat projects to award seed and plugs generated from collection efforts, resulting in approximately 267 acres ‘restored’ as well as over 17,000 acres under improved management through 124 signed letters of agreement.