Where Your Christmas Tree Comes From

A recent map on maps.com (an Esri run map site) by Joshua Stevens shows where Christmas trees are grown.

The data is from the U. S. Department of Agriculture. Each tree shaped spike represents a county. The most significant areas are in Oregon and North Carolina. If you click on the map you can activate a magnifier to play with.

The text below the map tells about the environmental advantages of natural trees over artificial ones though it feels a bit advertise-y. You can also read about the history behind the tree traditions and learn how to start your own tree farm. What's sadly missing from this map is the most important Christmas tree farm (to many people anyway) - the one that Taylor Swift grew up on.

Headwaters

When I see a river, I often think about where it comes from and where it goes. I started a mapping project showing this for the Northeastern United States. For the level of detail needed it was necessary to choose a manageable area so I chose where I've lived almost all of my life. Here is the view at full zoom.

This project was done using Felt, a nice package for collaboration or in this case merely making an interactive map. There is some subjectivity here; what are the most important rivers and where are the headwaters. The second one can be problematic because most rivers have many branches. This is especially true of the Susquehanna, with its north, south and west branches. On this map as you zoom in, the detail increases and the locations shift to indicate the many possible headwater locations.

For example, the Susquehanna River (North Branch) is considered to start at the outlet of Otsego Lake in Cooperstown, New York. However, there are numerous creeks that flow into that Lake from all directions. In this case I chose to show the two northernmost creeks.

This fall I drove through northeastern Pennsylvania and was hoping to see the point where the headwaters of the Genesee and Allegheny Rivers (flowing in opposite directions) come within a few hundreds of feet of each other near Gold, PA. Maybe it's not as impressive as the areas of the Himalayas where several of the world's most major rivers flow in parallel valleys,

but it's much more accessible to me. Unfortunately a construction detour and a wrong turn sent me in a different direction. 

I made another version that shows the river mouths in red. Again, this can be subjective, especially in the case of the Allegheny which really flows all the way to the Mississippi (or the Gulf of Mexico depending on the definition of mouth). 

Explore the map here.

Humpback Whale Migration

The Arctic University of Norway leads the Whaletrack program to map Humpback and Killer Whale migrations. 

Whales are tracked as they travel thousands of miles from the Barents Sea in the Arctic where they feed to winter breeding breeding grounds in the Caribbean Sea. The map above (posted on Flickr) beautifully illustrates the paths of various tracked whales. I like how the (unspecified) map projection shows a more or less direct great circle-like route across the Atlantic to the coast of Norway and then to the Svalbard Archipelago. 

There is also an interactive map where you can choose individual whale tracks and see dates.

More on the Whaletrack project can be found here.