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/.)

Corporal punishment in schools is legal in the 19 states shown on this map (the darker the color, the higher the rate of corporal punishment, as reported to the Department of Education). Roughly 75% of all corporal punishment cases occur in four states: Mississippi, Texas, Alabama, and Arkansas, with Mississippi having both the most cases and the highest rate of corporal punishment.  (Map from www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/10/14/states-teachers-paddle/.)

According to a New York Times analysis, more than 370 candidates for U.S. Senate, U.S. House of Representatives, governor, secretary of state, and attorney general -- the vast majority of Republicans running for those running seats -- have questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election. This topological map provides a look at where election denial has (and has not) come to dominate Republican political discourse. (Map from www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/10/13/us/politics/republican-candidates-2020-election-misinformation.html.)

When young adults move away from home in the U.S., where do they go? It turns out that the top destinations vary by ethnicity and parental income.  New York City attracts the richest quintile of young adults, for example, but Black young adults are most likely to move to Atlanta regardless of income level. Los Angeles is the most popular destination for all but the top income quintile of White and Asian young adults and for Hispanic young adults regardless of parental income. Hispanic young adults are most likely to move to cities in the Southwest (e.g., Phoenix, San Antonio) whereas Asian young adults are most likely to move to cities in California (e.g., San Francisco, San Diego). Affluent White young adults are the only group to include Chicago among the their top five destinations. www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/10/14/states-teachers-paddle/

One of my geography classes recently explored family ancestry and the related issues of immigration patterns and language dispersal. This set of maps from The Washington Post illustrates the concentration of Nordic ancestry in the Upper Midwest.   (Map from www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/10/07/midwest-orchestras-conservatories-airbnb/.)

The U.S. has five territories -- American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Marianas Islands, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands -- and all five have been losing population to the mainland.  This recent article from The Washington Post profiles why residents of each territory have been moving and where, on the mainland, they have been moving to: www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/09/23/american-territories-population-loss/

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.)

Banned Books Week just concluded.  This map from Quartz looks at book bans by state: i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/f243d7078b90019860ee2c5356763ac3.jpg

Persistent drought has exacerbated wildfire damage in the American Southwest, but more housing continues to be built in areas vulnerable to wildfires. The maps in this article from The New York Times compare housing developments in 1990 and 2020 in the areas around Sacramento, CA, Denver, CO, and San Antonio/Austin, TX. www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/09/climate/growing-wildfire-risk-homes.html

This map looks at the geography of Chicago shootings in which a parent was killed.  (Map from  www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/interactive/2022/kids-witness-parents-shot-killed/.)

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.)

California's Central Valley is one of the world's most productive agricultural regions. But it is also periodically, at least measured in geologic time, a long, thin lake. Massive flooding inundates the Central Valley when moisture-rich atmospheric rivers, like the Pineapple Express, stall over California, dumping rain and melting snow in the Sierras. Recent research shows this happens, on average, every 100-200 years. Because this happened most recently between Dec. 1861 and Jan. 1862, scientists are increasingly concerned that the region is ripe for a megaflood event. www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/12/megaflood-california-flood-rain-climate/

The Economist (UK) ranked 172 cities around the world for livability, based on more than 30 factors related to stability, education, health care, infrastructure, culture, and environment. In North America, the four most livable cities were all in Canada this year, with Calgary edging out Vancouver. In the U.S., this year's most livable city was Atlanta, followed by Washington, D.C. and Honolulu. www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2022/08/05/the-best-places-to-live-in-north-america

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), this year high-tide or "sunny day" flooding -- when water floods streets and bubbles up through storm drains without storm activity -- on the East Coast of the U.S. is expected to show an increase of more than 150% since 2000. NOAA's calculations are based on data from a network of water-level stations along the U.S. coasts and Great Lakes. This interactive mapping site shows past, present, and anticipated 2050 sunny day flooding levels. (In Washington, DC, for example, the average number of high-tide flooding events in 2000 was three; in 2021, it was five, and by 2050, it is forecast to be 55-85.) tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/HighTideFlooding_AnnualOutlook.html

This geo-graphic compares per capita spending on pharmaceuticals in the U.S. to that in a sampling of peer-group (OECD) countries: www.statista.com/chart/3967/which-countries-pay-the-most-for-medicinal-drugs

If you are tracking U.S. wildfires this season, ArcGIS is providing a free real-time look at U.S. wildfire activity based on open-source data, including thermal satellite imaging: www.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.html?webmap=df8bcc10430f48878b01c96e907a1fc3#!

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

The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis has released data showing the impact of the first year of the COVID pandemic on arts employment, by state: www.bea.gov/system/files/inline-images/acpsa0322d.png

I was cleaning out some old papers in my office and came across this rather stunning map I had saved from 2014 showing that, as of 2013, median household income in the U.S. had peaked at least 15 years earlier in 81 percent of U.S. counties. The interactive map at The Washington Post website allows users to mouse over counties for specific data: www.washingtonpost.com/wp-stat/graphics/business/income/index.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.)

In the U.S., there are about 150,000 traditional gas stations and only about 6,000 fast-charging electric vehicle stations, despite the sale of more than 400,000 electric vehicles in 2021. This map, from MIT Technology Review, shows the geographic distribution of the fast-charging EV stations:  www.technologyreview.com/2022/06/28/1053908/electric-vehicle-charging-stations/

This is one of several compelling graphics from a recent report in The Economist (UK) about slavery in the U.S. prior to the Civil War.  (Map from www.economist.com/interactive/graphic-detail/2022/06/18/slave-trade-family-separation.)

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.)