Where Livestock Outnumber People

I just discovered Erin Davis and her site while looking for unrelated content. She's done some great work with maps and statistics including this map showing what counties have more livestock than people (data is from the USDA).

I love the big circle legend. It lets you dig into a complicated multi-variate color scheme so you can see that, for example the green areas (such as southwestern Wisconsin and northwestern Arkansas) primarily have a combination of cows (blue) and chickens (yellow) and not so many pigs. Black areas such as in Montana have more of all three than people.

 Scroll down the page and you can see the individual maps for each animal plus maps of counties with more goats, sheep and turkeys than people.

Finally, at the bottom is a map of the most common type of livestock by county.

For the entire map set go here.

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.

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. 

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.

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

Horses and Cows of France

I found this map online showing the large breeds (mostly horse and cows but also donkeys and mules) of France.

It appears to be a classroom map from 1960 from what I can tell with my bad French translation skills. There are a couple of zoomed in looks on this page.

The top corner compares horses around the world by average(?) size while the bottom right corner does the same for cows.

For 52 euros you can buy a copy here.