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

A viral hemorrhagic fever similar to Ebola -- Marburg virus -- has recently been confirmed in Ghana for the first time, in the southern Ashanti region highlighted on this map. Unlike Ebola, Marburg has no vaccine. The Ashanti region is home to Ghana's second largest city, Kumasi.  ghananursing2014.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/ashanti-region.jpg

How much more are you, personally, willing to pay in higher food prices to tackle climate change? That is the essence of the question farmers, governments, and agribusiness are wrangling with in trying to figure out who should bear the costs of changes to farming practices that might rein in greenhouse gas emissions. www.nytimes.com/2022/07/09/business/farmers-climate-change.html

Oceans cover nearly three-fourths of our planet's surface, but what goes on under the water is usually out of sight and, often, out of mind. This article brings to the surface changes in the biogeography of the waters off Maine: divemagazine.com/scuba-diving-long-reads/i-dived-the-gulf-of-maine-and-saw-one-fish

Soil composition is a vital but often-neglected component of physical and biogeography. Like the American Midwest, Ukraine and southern Russia have some of the world's most productive soil, called chernozem (in Eurasia and Canada) or mollisol (in the U.S). This article from Science News looks at ways in which war has a lasting impact on the underlying soil chemistry, hydrology, structure, and physical composition: www.sciencenews.org/article/ukraine-russia-war-soil-agriculture-crops. (For a map that shows soil types around the world, check out this one from the USDA: https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/soils/use/?cid=nrcs142p2_054013.)

The U.S. is experiencing its worst outbreak of bird flu in seven years, resulting in the culling of nearly 40 million chickens and turkeys. This map, from the digital business journal Quartz, reflects both the spread of bird flu and the geographic concentration of commercial chicken operations.  (Map from qz.com/2162831/free-range-chickens-are-facing-global-bird-flu-lockdowns.)

According to a recent investigative report by The Washington Post, "The pattern is clear: First, the forest is razed. Then the cattle are moved in. If the Amazon is to die, it will be beef that kills it. And America will be an accomplice. Cattle ranching, responsible for the great majority of deforestation in the Amazon, is pushing the forest to the edge of what scientists warn could be a vast and irreversible dieback that claims much of the biome." This map, based on satellite data, shows Brazil's portion of the Amazon River basin and where rainforest has been converted, often illegally, to pastureland: www.gannett-cdn.com/presto/2022/05/01/PDTN/a9baa492-b47e-4da0-aa3f-c32911150f4c-2022-04-30_23_24_31-pasture-vs-deforestion.png (from the print edition of www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2022/amazon-beef-deforestation-brazil/).

Things are blooming, buzzing, leafing out, and crawling by.  But is that a bluebell or a balloon flower? A black swallowtail or a red-spotted purple? The free Seek app from iNaturalist helps users identify the plants, animals, and fungus they're seeing simply by scanning them with the camera on a smartphone. There's more information about Seek and links to download the app (from Google Play or the App Store) at www.inaturalist.org/pages/seek_app.

The war in Ukraine is bottling up wheat exports and, especially in the southern and eastern parts of the country, damaging winter wheat fields planted last fall and interfering with spring planting. This geo-graphic from Statista highlights the countries most dependent on Ukrainian and Russian wheat: www.statista.com/chart/27181/least-developed-countries-dependent-on-wheat-from-russia-ukraine

Trying to fill a void in national infectious-disease forecasting in the U.S., the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) has launched its new Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics "to develop faster, richer evidence to predict trends and guide decision-making during emergencies." www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2022/p0419-forecasting-center.html (The CDC's announcement will probably be greeted with a mixture of relief and skepticism by those who read The Premonition, Michael Lewis's recent nonfiction book about the coronavirus pandemic.)

Changes in physical geography -- including changes in weather patterns -- can create biogeographic changes too. Australia's recent, and unprecedented, outbreak of Japanese encephalitis is a case in point. Japanese encephalitis is a mosquito-borne disease endemic to Asia. However, record flooding in eastern Australia in March created wetlands for migratory birds, which are thought to have brought Japanese encephalitis with them to Australia. When native mosquitoes, also plentiful due to the flooding, bit the infected birds and then people and other animals, both wild and domestic, Japanese encephalitis began spreading in Australia. Because the virus is now present in animal hosts, it is unlikely the disease will be eradicated from Australia. Instead, the geographic range for Japanese encephalitis has expanded to include eastern Australia. www.newscientist.com/article/2312539-australias-japanese-encephalitis-outbreak-blamed-on-climate-change/

Earth Day is next week. This map shows (in green) the parts of the world's terrestrial surface least impacted by humans. The darker the green, the less human activity in that region. www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/where-people-arent

The demand for cacti, which tend to be slow growing, and succulents used in xeriscaping has created a huge uptick in plant poaching. This article from Geographical (UK) looks at what is being described as an "epidemic" of poaching of rare succulents in South Africa, a country that, previously, has been better known for animal poaching: geographical.co.uk/nature/wildlife/item/4287-south-africa-s-new-plant-poaching-epidemic

Tulips, as both bulbs and cut flowers, are strongly associated with the Netherlands. But the Netherlands' dominance in floriculture extends far beyond tulips. In fact, the Aalsmeer Flower Market, southwest of Amsterdam, oversees the distribution of 43 million cut flowers every day! Flowers are flown into Aalsmeer from all over the world, sorted, graded, auctioned, and rapidly distributed across Europe. The building in which the flower auction is held is the fourth largest building in the world by footprint, roughly the size of 200 soccer fields. www.visitaalsmeer.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/RoyalHolland-Flower-Auction-Aalsmeer-1-1920x1440.jpg

HHMI Biointeractive has hundreds of free online activities to enrich life science learning, including this new one for high school students that uses data science to understand island biogeography: www.biointeractive.org/classroom-resources/exploring-island-biogeography-through-data

China's agricultural minister recently announced China is looking at its worst winter wheat harvest since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. Although the timing of the announcement is viewed as somewhat odd, China's wheat problems are assumed to be due to heavy rains and flooding in central China that impacted last fall's planting season.  China is the world's largest producer and consumer of wheat. ipad.fas.usda.gov/rssiws/al/crop_production_maps/China/China_wheat.jpg

The impact of even fairly conventional warfare can be long lived from a biogeographic perspective. A 460-square-mile area of northeastern France was so badly contaminated by shelling during WWI that shortly after the war the French government cordoned it off as the Zone Rouge, or Red Zone, an area deemed unfit for agriculture or human habitation. Even today, more than a century later, there are untold numbers of unexploded shells, including gas canisters, in the Zone Rouge and enough arsenic in the soil to kill 99% of plant life. www.atlasobscura.com/places/zone-rouge

You can find hands-on projects to learn about the vernal equinox, spring migrations, plant seasonality, frog song, and more at Journey North: journeynorth.org/

Brisbane, Australia, is vying to become the home port of Australia's new nuclear submarine fleet. Biogeography says this would be a very bad idea. Why? The abundant jellyfish in the waters off Brisbane would almost certainly clog the subs' intake valves and force a shutdown of the nuclear reactors powering the subs. It's happened before: www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/mar/11/jellyfish-nuclear-submarine-emergency-reactor-shutdown-brisbane-base-moreton-bay-australia

Biogeography includes the study of the geographic distribution of microbes, and right now researchers are watching intently the intersection of a virulent new strain of bird flu and the spring bird migration. About 6,000 wild cranes migrating through the Levant -- nearly 20% of the migrating Eurasian crane population -- have died of the disease and forced a cull of more than 1 million domestic chickens in Israel, for example. In the U.S., a bird flu outbreak first identified among domestic turkeys in Indiana has begun to spread to other states just as North America's spring bird migration gets underway. foodinstitute.com/focus/us-bird-flu-outbreak-has-poultry-operators-on-edge/

The series of graphs in this article compare COVID deaths and COVID risk factors across the world's large wealthy countries. www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/02/01/science/covid-deaths-united-states.html

When my geography students study biomes, the most unusual biome we learn about is the tepui, a kind of tabletop mountain found primarily in southern and eastern Venezuela. Tepuis are often home to plants found nowhere else in the world, including carnivorous plant species.  This article from Geographical (UK) chronicles the hunt for carnivorous plants on the most famous tepui, Mount Roraima, which is better known as the site of Angel Falls. geographical.co.uk/people/explorers/item/4218-hunting-for-carnivorous-plants-on-mount-roraima

Egypt's Wadi Al-Assiut protectorate (just west of the Nile, roughly half way between Cairo and Luxor) is home to many rare plants and animals, including the last hives of an Egyptian bee whose honey and venom have been used therapeutically since pharaonic times. www.al-monitor.com/originals/2021/11/neglected-egyptian-nature-reserve-home-last-pharaonic-honey-bees

Researchers have "mapped the location and density of Earth’s irrecoverable carbon — carbon locked in ecosystems that is potentially vulnerable to release from human development and, if lost, could not be restored to those ecosystems by 2050." This irrecoverable carbon, mostly residing in forests, peatlands, mangroves, and other natural areas, has been described as "the carbon we must protect to avert climate catastrophe." www.sciencenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/111821_jl_carbon_inline_desktop_rev.png  (Map and quotes from www.sciencenews.org/article/climate-change-natural-carbon-stores-new-map)