Urban gardens and rare butterflies: Mentoring undergraduate researchers while social distancing

In 2020, the pandemic hit at a time when I was gearing up to travel across the country for fieldwork. Like many others, traveling was not an option, and I had to pivot. During 2020, I mentored multiple undergraduates working on both in person and virtual projects. I will touch on two of the projects and share some insight on how these transformative times have changed the way I approach mentoring. As a pollinator ecologist on an urban campus in spring/summer 2020, an undergraduate and I observed gardens from the sidewalk to build upon a GIS project and assess pollinator-friendliness of gardens in the Boston Area, MA, USA. Our data show that 1) Somerville, MA is a relatively pollinator-friendly city, and 2) Google Earth is a useful tool for assessing pollinator-friendly gardens. During the fall, as a new faculty member interested in studying the at-risk frosted elfin butterfly, I mentored students on a fully virtual project using iNaturalist and Google Earth to identify suitable sites for this rare butterfly. Undergraduates scored each iNaturalist observation for suitability based on host plant range, land use category, and canopy cover, and created a map of suitable sites. This spring/summer, we will visit accessible sites to ground truth the map, search for butterflies, and identify future field sites.