Illegal Logging of 10 Hectares of Forest in the Sierra Chincua Monarch Butterfly Overwintering Area in Mexico

As far as we are aware, the first observation in 2015 of an illegal logging operation in the Sierra Chincua overwintering area within the core zone of the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in Mexico was made in April by a local environmentalist who notified Reserve personnel on 10 May (Moisés Acosta, personal communication). A public announcement that the logging was occurring in an undesignated area of the Sierra Chincua was made in a local news article on 26 May 2015 ( Rebollo 2015 ). Several months passed before an official government announcement of the illegal logging was made in a Mexico City press conference on 8 October 2015 ( PROFEPA 2015 ). Rafael Pacchiano, Secretary of SEMARNAT, the federal environmental agency, and Guillermo Haro, Director of PROFEPA (the federal environmental enforcement agency), reported that the Mexican army and police had raided the area and arrested 35 loggers between March and May and confiscated 147 cubic meters of wood that had been illegally logged in the Reserve. The report did not specify where the logging occurred; neither did another press release posted on 21 October ( Mejía 2015 ). On 18 November, Brower received an e-mail from Homero Aridjis, President of the Grupo de los Cien, who was told by a member of a local community that there had been severe cutting in the Sierra Chincua. On 21 November, Mexico News Daily stated that landowners from the Cerro Prieto and Jesús de Nazareno ejidos (communal agricultural landholdings) in the heart of the Sierra Chincua overwintering area claimed that 9 ha had been clear-cut ( Mexico News Daily 2015 ). Neither we nor other individuals were granted permission to visit the area in order to witness the logging, but we became aware of its severity when we examined current satellite imagery. On 18 December 2015, two of us presented preliminary results of this report describing the location and extent of the incursion to the Third International Symposium on the Monarch Butterfly, held in Morelia, Michoacán. The location of the logging was finally made public on 19 January 2016 ( Caballero 2016 ) and was subsequently acknowledged in a letter to the first author from the National Forestry Commission on 3 February ( Rescala-Pérez 2016 ). Here we document the logging operation and its potential negative impact on the spring remigration of the monarch butterfly.