Butterflies are on the move as climate change and habitat loss reshape their world

Butterflies are on the move — and climate change and habitat loss are largely to blame.

A new global study offers one of the most comprehensive looks yet at how butterfly species are responding to a changing planet. Researchers found evidence that 1,758 species — nearly 10% of known butterfly species — have changed where they live.

Many are expanding into new areas, often moving toward cooler regions as temperatures rise. Others are disappearing from parts of their historic ranges. Climate change and extreme weather are major drivers of these shifts, while habitat loss and agriculture are shrinking ranges in many regions.

But scientists say the true scale of the changes could be much larger. Monitoring is far more limited in tropical countries, home to most of the world’s insect diversity, leaving major gaps in our understanding of butterfly populations.

We hear from two leading butterfly researchers, Shawan Chowdhury, lead author of the study and head of the Global Change Ecology Lab at Monash University in Australia, and Nick Haddad, professor of integrative biology at Michigan State University, about why expanding into new areas may not always protect species from decline and how protecting connected habitats could help butterflies adapt to human-caused environmental changes.

The written article is available on my website here: ruththornton.com.

Links to resources:

Chowdhury et al., 2026: Extensive climate-induced range shifts in butterflies across the globe. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2026.

Chowdhury et al., 2026: A framework for the strategic conservation of tropical insects. BioScience, 2026: biag136.

Edwards et al., 2025: Rapid butterfly declines across the United States during the 21st century. Science, 387(6738): 1090-1094.

Pinkert et al., 2022: Global geographical and latitudinal variation in butterfly species richness captured through a comprehensive country-level occurrence database. Global Ecology and Biogeography, 31:830-839.

Citizen science: iNaturalist