Monarch butterflies may be heading down the road to extinction - once a prominent symbol of new life and springtime, the species is estimated to have fallen by as much as 90% in population during the last two decades.

According to News Daily, they will likely soon be warranted protection under the U.S. Endangered Species Act largely due to farm-related habitat loss. A combination of widespread pesticide use and genetically engineered crops have lead to the destruction of the milkweed plants the butterflies depend on to lay their eggs and nourish hatching larvae.

Furthermore, they are threatened by the logging of mountain forests in central Mexico and coastal California where some of them winter.

According to Marcus Kronforst - a University of Chicago ecologist who has studied monarchs-an estimated 1 billion monarchs migrated to Mexico in 1996 compared with just 35 million last year.

Forbes reports that United States Fish and Wildlife Service has chosen to move forward with a review on the species' protection due to a petition from the Center for Biological Diversity, the Center for Food Safety, the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, and monarch expert Dr. Lincoln Brower. The review is expected to take about a year to complete.

The review process is cumbersome - if the agency concludes that protection is warranted, it triggers the secondary process of proposing a new rule, taking public comment and possibly holding hearings. As a result, the soonest the monarch butterfly could have official endangered status is in 2016 or early 2017.

Sarina Jepsen, the Xerces Society's endangered species director, stated, "We are extremely pleased that the federal agency in charge of protecting our nation's wildlife has recognized the dire situation of the monarch... Protection as a threatened species will enable extensive monarch habitat recovery on both public and private lands."