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

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