Over the next few days and weeks, the number of migrating birds will rise sharply in the U.S.  BirdCast is a project of Colorado State and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology that produces daily bird migration forecast maps based on 23 years of weather radar data.  (Radar picks up bird -- and butterfly! -- migration, which is particularly useful given that many bird species migrate at night.) To check out today's forecast and the forecast for the next two days, see birdcast.info/migration-tools/migration-forecast-maps/

Phenology is the study of seasonal or cyclic natural phenomena, such as animal migration or the flowering of plants. The USA National Phenology Network provides a series of historic, real-time, and forecast maps related to a wide variety of plant, animal, and temperature cycles. This one looks at spring leafing anomalies (the darker the red, the earlier plants are leafing out relative to historic norms; the blue areas show delayed leafing).  From www.usanpn.org/data/spring_indices

NASA has released this map showing the world's major carbon dioxide emitters (in brown, with 3D shading) and absorbers (in green) from 2015-2020. Because this map is based on data collected by satellite, it includes measures for countries that have not reported emissions data in years. The major carbon-absorbing countries have large swaths of forest, particularly the taiga (or boreal forest) of Canada and Russia. news.yahoo.com/nasa-map-shows-which-countries-are-releasing-and-absorbing-co2-123341959.html

This article is about how mapping was used to solve the mystery of a 1979 anthrax outbreak that the Soviet Union tried to cover up: www.iflscience.com/-biological-chernobyl-when-a-deadly-infectious-disease-broke-out-from-a-soviet-lab-in-1979-67737.

Foods represent a key intersection between biogeography and cultural geography.  This article from Geographical (UK) looks at the importance of the nsenene, a seasonal, edible grasshopper, to communities in Kampala, the capital of Uganda: geographical.co.uk/culture/ugandas-beneficial-nsenene-feast

With warmer days ahead, insects will be breaking dormancy and hatching out. In the Ohio Valley and Mid-Atlantic, residents are being asked to be on the lookout for the spotted lanternfly, an insect native to Asia that was first found in Pennsylvania in 2014 (counties with infestations shown in blue on this map). The sticky secretions of the spotted lantern fly attract a black fungus that prevents photosynthesis on affected plant leaves and renders grapes unsuitable for consumption, among other things. www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/FBEBIV5KVZH73H2GH53HAHYII4.jpeg&w=1200  (Map from www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/02/01/spotted-lanternfly-fairfax-invasive-insect/.)

This series of maps looks at the prevalence of various animal names in place names across the U.S., but it's also an interesting proxy for biogeography. (No salmon in Illinois, for example, and no wild burros in Florida.) www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/VCPNVOYRSVEDXI6NT4JNLYV2AI.png&w=1200

Valentine's Day is a major chocolate-giving holiday. This site has an interesting collection of links related to the geography of chocolate: cocoarunners.com/the-geography-of-chocolate/

The biogeography of Siberia is changing as melting permafrost in the tundra is exposing viruses previously unknown to science, some of which have been trapped in the ice for tens of thousands of years. www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/12/02/zombie-virus-russia-permafrost-thaw/

Of the estimated 458 wildlife encounters that prove fatal for Americans each year, 440 of them are with deer. This map, based on crash data from State Farm, shows where Americans are most likely to have a auto claim involving an animal, with drivers in West Virginia, Montana, and Michigan being the most likely to collide with an animal.  According to State Farm, about 70% of animal-related auto claims nationally are due to collisions with deer specifically. (Map from www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/01/20/deer-car-collisions/.)

The ranges of three types of fungi that cause serious lung infections (histoplasmosis, coccidioidomycosis, and blastomycosis) are expanding in the U.S., as the series of maps based on Medicare data in this article show: www.sciencenews.org/article/fungi-cause-serious-lung-infections-found

New York City recently updated its map of every tree on public land in the city: tree-map.nycgovparks.org/tree-map

Nearly 11 billion snow crabs have disappeared from the northern Pacific and Arctic. Yes, climate change almost certainly played a role, but is the more complex truth that we counted wrong and ate them? nautil.us/where-have-all-the-snow-crabs-gone-248247

Students in some of my geography classes learn about one of our most unusual biomes, a tepui. Found almost exclusively in Venezuela -- Angel Falls, the world's highest waterfall, cascades down a tepui -- these distinctive tabletop mountains host a range of plants and animals found nowhere else in the world. This article highlights the use of satellite imagery to document the extent of illegal gold mining destroying a tepui in Venezuela's Yapacana National Park considered sacred to the indigenous people and home to several critically endangered species.  www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/12/06/venezuela-yapacana-gold-mining/

Although nine states have more cattle than people -- South Dakota, for example, has 4x as many cattle as people -- 94% of Americans live in counties in which humans outnumber cattle. The Washington Post's data visualization team produced this map to help answer the question why so many Americans have never seen a cow :-).  (Map from www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/10/28/congress-college-majors-economics/.)

If you've been hiking at or above the tree line in the Sierra Nevadas, Pacific Northwest, or northern Rocky Mountains, you have probably passed a whitebark pine tree; these are often the highest-elevation pine tree found in these areas. But the whitebark pine is being decimated by a nonnative fungus and a native beetle that is benefiting from warming temperatures, contributing to the tree's current consideration for protection under the Endangered Species Act. This article from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology discusses the biogeographic interplay between the whitebark pine and Clark's nutcracker, a bird that both depends on the whitebark pine and is critical for the dissemination of whitebark pine seeds: www.allaboutbirds.org/news/can-the-clarks-nutcracker-help-its-bff-the-whitebark-pine-recover-from-disaster

Uganda is experiencing an outbreak of Ebola in the districts shown in brown on this map (from Forbes), all of which are northwest of the capital of Kampala, on the shores of Lake Victoria. Unlike previous Ebola outbreaks, the current outbreak in Uganda is caused by a strain for which there is no vaccine, no effective antiviral treatment, and no rapid test. imageio.forbes.com/specials-images/imageserve/634062ae9ae26158286461d8/960x0.jpg

Over the last two decades, China has built a vast ocean fishing fleet that has depleted China's own fishing stocks and now spends most of its time in and near the territorial waters of other countries. This recent article from The New York Times includes a series of maps profiling the journeys of a Chinese-owned refrigerated cargo ship that offloads catches from fishing vessels in South American waters, including in waters adjacent to the protected marine sanctuary of the Galapagos Islands: www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/26/world/asia/china-fishing-south-america.html

Fog is a vital characteristic of biomes ranging from temperate rainforests to cloud forests and may even become a source of water commercially harvested for drinking. Yet scientists around the world are finding that fog, particularly along the coasts, seems to be in decline for complex reasons, including warming oceans.  "Fog may be the most difficult meteorological phenomenon to capture, calculate and predict. Unlike temperature, precipitation, humidity or wind, there is no reliable gauge for it. There is not even a practical definition of it. Most will say that fog is a cloud that touches the ground, which sounds simple enough. But fog is movement in three dimensions, dipping and rising, forming and disappearing. Sometimes a thin layer hugs the water below the Golden Gate Bridge, blinding mariners. Sometimes it settles about 200 feet higher, blinding drivers. Sometimes it shrouds the top of the bridge’s towers and the airspace above, blinding pilots. Sometimes it does it all. Which of those things is fog? ... Fog from the ocean is a dependable feature in several places around the globe, mostly on the west coasts of major continents. Villages in places like Peru and Chile, sometimes with almost no rain throughout the year, have for centuries sustained themselves largely on fog water. ... Using observational data at airports in the coastal redwood region — from central California to its northern border, including the Bay Area — they found that the frequency of fog, measured by fog hours per day, had dropped 33 percent since the middle of the 20th century." www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/14/climate/san-francisco-fog.html

Farmers in the Southwestern U.S. are ripping out orchards, switching to less water-intensive crops, and renting out their land to try to save water and raise money in the face of an extended drought. This map compares vegetation stress in August 2022 with the average August vegetation stress from 1984 to 2020: green is more healthy, red is more stressed.  (Map from  www.wsj.com/articles/drought-in-u-s-west-leads-farmers-to-look-elsewhere-for-revenue-11664535602.)

Humans have a notoriously bad track record of trying to intervene "helpfully" in natural environments. Yet today, natural environments need more help than ever before *and* humans have more tools at their disposal to intervene than ever before, from CRISPR gene edits, to sophisticated reproductive technologies, to species relocations. What could go wrong? This article considers some of the ethical questions at the frontier of conservation biology: www.nytimes.com/2022/09/16/opinion/conservation-ethics.html

The geologic record shows animals are not the only things that migrate: forests move hundreds of miles, back and forth, in response to changing climate patterns. Recent research, based on satellite imagery and field work, finds that white spruce are now germinating and fully establishing themselves north of Alaska's Brooks Range, which had previously been the biogeographic divide between tundra, to the north, and boreal forest, to the south. This map, from Quartz, shows the newly documented spruce in Alaska's northern tundra. (Map from  qz.com/spruce-trees-have-arrived-in-the-arctic-tundra-a-centur-1849406537.)

One of the terms my biogeography students learn is "extirpated," which means a species has gone extinct in part of its former range. India is undertaking a project to reverse extirpation: cheetahs are being reintroduced to Kuno National Park in north-central India. Cheetahs were extirpated from India more than 50 years ago. The cheetahs being reintroduced to India are African cheetahs; today, all that remains of the Asiatic cheetah that once roamed from India to the Arabian Peninsula is 12 individuals, 9 males and 3 females, in Iran. www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-62377387

The ocean's fish are on the move in response to climate change. What happens when "your" fish move to someone else's territorial waters? This article from The Independent (UK) looks at new research about fish movement and the impact these movements may have on international fishing agreements. www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/fish-stocks-climate-crisis-disputes-b1996157.html

Plants, animals, and microbes move around based on changes in the physical environment and human activity. This shifting geography was documented recently by the appearance in southern Mississippi of a dangerous microbe previously found only in tropical and subtropical zones, including northern Australia, parts of Central and South America, and South and Southeast Asia: www.nytimes.com/2022/07/27/health/deadly-bacteria-us-soil-water.html