Welcome to the Farfalle Project

Project Goals

The goals of the Farfalle Project are:

To build and deploy an environmental sensor network into one or more of the Monarch butterfly over-wintering areas in California.
To acquire and aggregate the collected environmental data.
To display and correlate the data and make raw environmental data available to interested parties.

Monarch Butterflies

Each fall one generation of Monarch butterflies is born which is quite different from their immediate ancestors. The fall generation does not mate and lay eggs, but rather undertakes a long and difficult journey to over-wintering grounds in warmer climates. For the butterflies east of the Rocky mountains, they travel all the way to Mexico to find a location suitable to survive the winter. For those butterflies west of the Rocky mountains and particularly west of the Sierra Nevada mountains, the journey stops along the coast of California. There the moderating influence of the Pacific Ocean insures that the weather remains warm enough to survive the winter.

The butterflies remain near the ocean until spring arrives. Then they mate and begin the next year's cycle. Males die soon after mating. Females fly north in search of milkweed on which they lay their eggs. The lifecycle of the new generations is only a few weeks long as the caterpillars turn into butterflies who mate and continue to follow the milkweed plants northward. The fascination of Monarchs is the returning generation has never been to the over-wintering site before and several, sometimes four or five, generations have been born and die before the next autumn trek. Yet still they are able to find their way to the over-wintering site.

Monarch Butterfly Resources

The following web sites (in no particular order) have additional information about Monarch butterflies.

Project Information

Technical information about the Farfalle Project can be found through the following links or by browsing the project files.