Wednesday, October 18, 2017

Where the Animals Go

Where the Animals Go is a new book by cartographer James Cheshire and graphic artist Oliver Uberti. It highlights the use of technology to track animal behavior illustrated with some beautiful maps and charts. A quote from the book's website gives a nice look into it contents.
These astonishing infographics explain how warblers detect incoming storms using sonic vibrations, how baboons make decisions, and why storks prefer garbage dumps to wild forage; they follow pythons racing through the Everglades, a lovelorn wolf traversing the Alps, and humpback whales visiting undersea mountains.
This is a detail from a map showing the tracks of Elephant Seals equipped with temperature and salinity sensors. They dive deep down into the water, making them great candidates for getting these measurements at various ocean depths.
http://wheretheanimalsgo.com/seals/
Here are GPS tracks from 25 baboons near the Mpala Research Center in Kenya. The "sleeping tree" was used when there was a leopard on the prowl. 
http://wheretheanimalsgo.com/baboons/
This one details how warblers fled areas of the southeastern United States in advance of a series of tornadoes. They fled a couple of days ahead of time, meaning that they were able to detect the storms well before our normal weather sensors could.
http://wheretheanimalsgo.com/warblers/

For more information, including where to buy the book, see the book's web page.

No comments: