The Marine Migration Map

tracked migrations of the Green Turtle

Migratory Connectivity in the Ocean (MiCO) is an interactive map visualizing the global migrations of more than 100 species of birds, mammals, turtles and fish. The aim of the map is to bring together knowledge about the migratory routes and connected habitats of marine species, such as marine mammals, seabirds, sea turtles, and fish, in order to help support global conservation efforts.

The MiCO map was compiled by synthesizing decades of animal movement data from over 1,300 scientific studies published between 1990 and 2017. To create the map researchers compiled satellite tracking data from 109 migratory marine species, including seabirds, whales, sea turtles, and fish, collected through animal-borne tags that record and transmit migration routes. These tracking studies, conducted by universities, government agencies, and conservation organizations, have now been aggregated, standardized, and mapped to show key habitats and migratory pathways. 

By bringing together data from over 100 species and 100 studies, MiCO highlights critical corridors and habitats that multiple migratory animals rely on, helping policymakers and conservationists prioritize protection in key areas, especially in international waters where governance is fragmented. It is hoped that MiCO can help foster cross-jurisdictional collaboration, support data-driven policy decisions, and help prioritize conservation actions in both national waters and international seas, where migratory species are most vulnerable yet least protected.

Explore more migratory journey maps through the animal tracking tag

No News is Bad News

Over 200 counties across the United States now lack a single source of local news. Another 1,500 have only one. As a result, more than 50 million Americans live in what researchers call “news deserts”, areas with little to no access to reliable local reporting.

A new interactive map, developed by the Medill Local News Initiative, provides the most detailed view yet of this crisis. Their Local News Barometer and Watch List, updated in 2025 with new demographic and media data, serves as both a diagnostic tool and a forecast, helping journalists, lawmakers, funders, and citizens understand where local news is dying, and where it might disappear next.

The map includes a Local News Watchlist - a collection of counties identified as having more than a 40% chance of becoming news deserts within the next five years. The latest version, highlights 249 such counties. These at-risk areas are not just underserved - they are, on average, poorer, older, and less educated than even existing news deserts. If you select a state from the map sidebar then the Watchlist will update to show all the counties in the selected state in the most danger of becoming news deserts.

The map’s most sobering takeaway is that America is increasingly becoming two nations when it comes to local news: one with abundant access in affluent, urbanized regions, and another without. The consequences are profound. Research shows that communities without local news experience lower civic engagement, less voter participation, and weaker accountability in public institutions.

Serendipitous Street View Fun

Internet Roadtrip

Yesterday, I spent a lot of time virtually exploring cities around the world, guided by StreetWhip's impressive AI technology. Today's serendipitous Street View adventure, however, has been powered by the delightful Internet Roadtrip.

Internet Roadtrip is the latest engaging project from the always entertaining Neal.fun. It takes you on a drive through Google Street View—but with a twist. On this drive, it's the wisdom of the crowd that determines the route. Every ten seconds, Internet Roadtrip presents users with a choice. If we're at a junction, the options might be to turn left, turn right, or go straight ahead. The direction we take is then decided by the votes of the hundreds of people currently playing.

Sometimes, you're not at a junction. In those moments, the voting options might include continuing forward, changing the radio station, or turning the radio off entirely. A small mini-map insert tracks the journey so far, as guided by the crowd’s collective decisions.

When I first played the game yesterday, Internet Roadtrip was meandering through Boston. Today, it's in Norwood, Massachusetts. According to Google Maps, that’s about 23 miles as the crow flies. But with the circuitous route enforced by the crowd’s decisions, I’m sure the actual journey has covered many, many more miles.

A Guided Street View Tour of the World

StreetWhip

If you've ever lost an hour (or five) wandering the globe via Google Street View, you’re not alone. There’s something uniquely thrilling about virtually dropping into a faraway town and soaking in the details — the architecture, the people, the colors of everyday life. But what if you could do more than just look? What if you had a knowledgeable, curious local guide whispering in your ear, telling you what you're seeing and why it matters?

Welcome to StreetWhip — a wildly addictive mashup of Google Street View and artificial intelligence that turns virtual wandering into a rich, immersive learning experience. Think of it as a reverse Geoguessr: instead of guessing where you are, StreetWhip tells you where you are, what you’re seeing, and the deeper stories behind it all.

Not Just a Street — A Story

Let’s say you’re standing on a bridge over the Dijver canal in Bruges. To the untrained eye, it’s a scenic view with charming brick buildings lining the water. But click on a StreetWhip link, and suddenly you’re informed:

"That’s the Old St. John’s Hospital, one of the oldest surviving hospital buildings in Europe. Notice the row of smaller arched windows near the bottom? Those illuminated the original wards."

It’s like turning on an X-ray vision for cultural and historical insight. StreetWhip identifies buildings, styles, historical relevance, and even hidden quirks in the environment — all powered by AI that acts like your personal tour guide. It brings a layer of meaning to what would otherwise just be “some random street.”

Why StreetWhip Is So Addictive

What makes StreetWhip so brilliant is that it taps into something deeply human: curiosity. You’re not being led through a pre-designed museum exhibit — you’re exploring, poking around unfamiliar neighborhoods in Japan, Uruguay, or Morocco and then being rewarded with tidbits of local culture, architectural nuance, and historical backstory.

Google Maps Needs Street Whip

StreetWhip is so informative and useful that Google should seriously consider implementing something like it directly into Google Maps. I still fondly remember the Wikipedia layer that unfortunately Google removed back in 2013. StreetWhip feels like its spiritual successor: a smart, engaging map companion for those of us who love learning about the world.

Google Talking Tours

Google has actually taken some tentative steps toward implementing an AI travel guide for Street View. Google Talking Tours, a collaboration between the Google Arts & Culture Lab and artist-in-residence Gaël Hugo, is an experimental project that leverages generative audio and Google’s Gemini AI to provide dynamic, location-specific insights about cultural landmarks featured in Street View.

However, unlike StreetWhip, Talking Tours is limited to just 55 major landmarks around the world. It offers an AI-generated audio guide that delivers insights based on the visual content of Street View panoramas. Users can explore a 360-degree view of a site, take a snapshot, and receive detailed commentary from the AI. Additionally, there's an “Ask a Question” button that generates three contextual questions about the location, enhancing interactivity and personalized learning.

Google Talking Tours is a promising start, but it barely scratches the surface of what’s possible. Taking inspiration from StreetWhip — with its deep contextual insights, spontaneous street-level discovery, and playful interactivity — Google could use its Gemini AI to transform Google Maps' vast Street View archive into something far richer: not just a map, but a living, breathing encyclopedia of the world.

The World's Terrorist Hotpots

Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger all rank among the top five countries most impacted by terrorism (Pakistan and Syria are the other two). In fact, the Sahel region of Africa has become the epicenter of global terrorism, accounting for over half of all terrorism-related deaths worldwide. Notably, only seven Western countries appear in the top 50 most affected.

You can explore the full rankings on Vision of Humanity’s Global Terrorism Index. Their interactive map highlights the degree to which each country is impacted by terrorism, with the most affected nations shown in red.

The Global Terrorism Index (GTI) is an annual report that measures the impact of terrorism across 163 countries, representing 99.7% of the global population. Developed by the Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP), the GTI draws from data sources including Terrorism Tracker to produce a composite score for each nation. This score, which ranges from 0 (no impact) to 10 (maximum impact), reflects factors such as the number of terrorist incidents, fatalities, injuries, and property damage in a given year. 

In 2023 the United States experienced a 15-year low in total attacks. However despite this overall drop there has been a sharp 200% rise in anti-semitic attacks. The US also accounted for 76% of terrorism-related deaths in Western democracies.

Kangaroos Don't Vote - People Do

If ever an election needed a cartogram map, it was the 2025 Australian federal election.

If you were to view The Australian’s Electorate Map - 2025, you could be forgiven for thinking the Liberals had cruised to a landslide victory. This traditional cartogram election map is visually dominated by the blue of the Liberal Party. It also appears as if the Labor Party (shown using salmon pink) made only a few modest gains in the Northern Territory, Tasmania, and a handful of electorates in the southeast of the country.

It just goes to confirm the well-worn cliché: "kangaroos don't vote — people do."

The Guardian’s "Exaggerated" view does a slightly better job of visually representing the large number of urban seats won by Labor in this election. Their Australian election results 2025 map map allows users to toggle between a traditional geographical view and an exaggerated one, in which "smaller electorates are increased in size for visibility."

However, even The Guardian’s exaggerated view still falls short of clearly conveying the full story of the 2025 election - with 82% of the results called, Labor holds 82 seats compared to just 32 for the L/NP Coalition.

ABC News’ Live: Maps show swing to Labor, crash in Coalition vote does an excellent job of illustrating the massive swing to Labor in this election compared to 2022. Using a series of swing arrow maps, ABC visualizes the changes in vote share since the previous election in both the two-party-preferred vote and the primary vote. The screenshot above shows "the change in the two-candidate-preferred vote in each electorate." As you can see, there are far more red arrows — representing a swing towards Labor — than blue arrows — which indicate a swing towards the Coalition.

The Democracy Sausage Map

The 2025 Australian federal election will be held tomorrow, 3 May 2025. One of the most iconic and uniquely Australian traditions on election day is the “democracy sausage.” As voters head to the polls to cast their ballots, many are greeted by the smell of sizzling sausages at local polling places, where community groups and schools run sausage sizzles as fundraisers.

The Democracy Sausage Map is a crowd-powered tool that helps hungry voters find out exactly where they can score a snag (and sometimes cake!) while casting their vote. The map is powered by self-described “crowdsauce” data collected from social media, polling booths, and tip-offs from the great Aussie public.

The map uses different icons to show what’s on offer at each sausage sizzle stall. These include markers for sausages, cakes, vegetarian options, coffee, bacon and egg rolls, and halal choices. When zoomed out, a polling booth may not display the full range of available fare — but zooming in on your local neighbourhood should reveal the full menu.

Drinking & Eating in the Sun

Sunseekr

London is actually having one of its rare weeks in the sun so I have been using Sunseekr to help me find cafes and pubs which are in the sun.

SunSeekr is an interactive map with a sunny twist. The map helps users locate cafés and pubs currently bathed in sunlight, so you can sip your espresso or enjoy your pint while enjoying some rays. What makes Sunseekr shine (pun intended) is the clever integration of real-time sun and shadow simulation with a database of local venues, that allows you to instantly see which cafés and pubs are currently bathed in sunlight and which are in the shade.

SunSeekr uses terrain and building data to calculate where light actually falls at any given moment — not just based on general weather or time of day, but down to the angles and obstructions that might block the sun. The map even comes with a time control so you can plan which cafés and pubs to visit later. 

From a technical perspective, Sunseekr is impressive under the hood. It leverages Mapbox for interactive, global-scale mapping, and layers on tools like Turf.js and a shadow simulation plugin to bring the sun's position into focus in a hyperlocal, real-time way. 

JveuxDuSoleil 

Sunseekr is not an entirely original concept. JveuxDuSoleil is an amazing French interactive map (that has been around for a number of years) which also simulates the location of shadows. If you are looking for the perfect spot to catch a little sun (or escape from the sun) then you can open up JveauDuSoleil and quickly discover which areas will be shaded at any time of the day. In a number of French cities JveuxDuSoleil also shows the locations of restaurants with outdoor terraces — just what you need to find the perfect al fresco dining spot.

Shade Map

Shade Map is an interactive map which allows you to view the location of shadows from the sun throughout the day. Search for any location in the world on Shade Map and the application will show you which local areas are currently in shade. 

At the bottom of the map is a timeline control which allows you to view shadow locations for any time of the day. Drag this time slider back and forth and the map will automatically update to show how the shadows move during the course of the day. If you click on the date then the time control will switch to show months instead of hours of the day. Now you can use the time control to show where shade will fall during the different months of the year. Just click on the time to switch back to showing the hours of the day.

Shadowmap

Shadowmap is another interactive 3D map which allows you to view the location of building shadows around the world for any time of day and on any day of the year. 

Shadowmap not only shows you the shadows that will be cast by nearby buildings at any precise moment it also includes an interactive sun ray overlay. This overlay shows you the exact direction of the sun's rays — so you can see for yourself where the sun will be in the sky at any moment of the day.

Mapping the Sudanese Civil War

Two years into Sudan’s civil war, the country remains gripped by a humanitarian catastrophe and a relentless power struggle that has devastated lives and reshaped its landscape. What began on April 15, 2023, as a clash between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), has since escalated into a nationwide conflict. With over 14 million people displaced and tens of thousands killed, Sudan now faces one of the world's most severe displacement crises.

Al Jazeera has published an interactive animated map to visualize the tragic scale of the conflict between April 2023 and March 2025. This map, created using data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) project, plots more than 11,000 recorded attacks across Sudan’s 18 states. What makes the map especially compelling is its temporal animation: showing the conflict unfold over time, attack by attack, with color-coded markers identifying the perpetrators - SAF, RSF, or other groups such as local militias and rebel movements.

The animation captures not just the quantity of violence, but its geographic concentration. Nearly three-quarters of all attacks occurred in Khartoum, Gezira, and North Darfur. Khartoum, the capital, emerges as the epicenter with over 5,500 attacks - an almost unimaginable transformation of an urban capital into a prolonged battlefield. Viewers can see the shift in the conflict over time, such as the rise in violence in Gezira following RSF incursions or the targeted assaults on displacement camps in North Darfur.

What stands out is the map’s ability to make an overwhelming dataset accessible. Color-coded pins differentiate between army strikes, RSF actions, and those of unaffiliated groups, while the gradual build-up of violence reveals critical inflection points - such as the peak in August 2023, and renewed escalations in early 2024. The result is a tool that is both informative and unsettling, allowing users to trace patterns of brutality, understand regional dynamics, and grasp the persistence of violence despite shifting frontlines.

2025 Canadian Election Maps

The Liberal Party, led by Mark Carney, has won the Canadian election but may fall just short of securing enough seats to form a majority government. Even if it falls short, it will still be seen as a massive victory for the incumbent party.

Just a few months ago, Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives were riding high in the polls and seemed poised to return to power. That momentum shifted dramatically after U.S. President Donald Trump launched a new trade war and called for Canada to become an American state. The remarks appeared to have an immediate impact on Canadian voters, many of whom turned away from the Conservatives, whose policies are most closely aligned with Trump's Republican Party.

The Toronto Star's Live Federal Election Map provides real-time results from all 343 ridings. Readers can click on any riding or use the search box to view detailed voting breakdowns, including the number and percentage of votes cast for each candidate and the winner in each seat.

The Globe and Mail's 2025 Election Map is very similar, allowing readers to search for ridings by name or click directly on the map to view the votes cast for each candidate. French speakers can view a very similar election map on TVA Nouvelles Fédérales 2025.