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Abstract
Butterflies are important and often imperiled indicator species. In 2018, theButterflies of the Atlantic Flyway Alliance (BAFA) formed to document butterfly migration along the coast of Georgia. This thesis is designed to help inform BAFA, and butterfly conservation more generally, with two objectives. The first is to provide a framework to guide future research on edge habitat effects on Lepidoptera. I used a systematic analysis with the framework to illuminate that current Lepidoptera literature is lacking incorporation top-down effects and other processes in edge effect research. The second is to document the migration of the gulf fritillary (Agraulis vanillae) along Jekyll Island, Georgia and subsequently illuminate how environmental conditions, time of day, and survey duration affect survey precision. I accomplish this through a temporal window analysis, using R2 as a metric of survey precision. I then provide a series of recommendations for BAFA and other citizen science programs.