All About Birds: Here’s How To Use The New Migration Forecast Tools From BirdCast. “Migration is the best time to be a bird watcher. Twice a year, hordes of birds travel thousands of miles to grace your home turf for a few days or weeks. But they don’t come in a steady stream—more like a cascade of arrivals coming in flurries and pauses. That’s why even during peak migration, some days are dead while others are packed with new arrivals. Now, our BirdCast project can help you know when those flurries are about to arrive, so you can plan when to get up early. They’ve boiled down decades of migration science, coupled it with real-time weather data, and created two simple tools: a 3-day migration forecast, and an up-to-the-moment replay of migration activity.”
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CNET: Google capturing spectacular million-crab march for Street View
CNET: Google capturing spectacular million-crab march for Street View. “Christmas Island, an Australian territory tucked just underneath Indonesia, is home to around 2,000 people. And crabs. Tens of millions of crabs. Each year, the females among these land crabs migrate to the sea, where they lay their eggs. It happens only once a year, but thanks to Google, you’ll soon be able to see it whenever you like.”
The Verge: This animated globe showing animal migration routes is mesmerizing
New-to-me, from The Verge: This animated globe showing animal migration routes is mesmerizing. “Animals have don’t need passports or visas, and they don’t care about countries’ borders — and that’s vividly illustrated by this animated globe. It shows migration routes for about 150 species based on tracking data shared by over 11,000 researchers from around the world. The pink lines follow the movement of animals covering at least 310 miles in one direction for at least 45 days, combining about 8,000 tracks collected over a period of about 10 years.”
The Conversation: New Data Set Explores 90 Years of Natural Disasters in the U.S.
The Conversation: New Data Set Explores 90 Years of Natural Disasters in the U.S.. “Our research team wanted to know how disasters affect people’s decisions to move in or out of particular areas. We created a new database that covers disasters in the United States from 1920 to 2010 at the county level, combining data from the American Red Cross as well as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and its predecessors.”
New Web Site Showcases Oral Histories of African-Americans Migrating in the Early 20th Century
A new Web site has oral histories of African-Americans who migrated from the southern US to the northern US in the early 20th century. “The oral histories were part of what was intended to be a larger project for the museum about the transformative effects of the influx of black Southerners on the city [of Philadelphia] in the early 20th century. From 1910 to 1930, their population rose from roughly 85,000 to almost 220,000. The interviews were aired on public radio in the 1980s, but Charles Hardy III, a historian and West Chester University professor, and his fellow researchers ran out of money to bring their vision to fruition.”
Database of Labor Migration
Tilburg University has launched a database about labor migration. “At the moment the labor migration database contains around one hundred scientific publications and policy and advisory reports on cross-border labor migration over the last twenty years or so. Over the next few years significant efforts will be made to expand the database. All publications contain keywords and a short summary with the most important insights.” Tilburg University is in the southern Netherlands and the database appears to be EU-focused.
Cornell Researchers Map Migratory Birds
This is very cool! The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has created an animated map of bird migration in the Western Hemisphere. “For the first time, scientists at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology have documented migratory movements of bird populations spanning the entire year for 118 species throughout the Western Hemisphere. The study finds broad similarity in the routes used by specific groups of species—vividly demonstrated by animated maps showing patterns of movement across the annual cycle.”
