Richard Smyth
Bird’s-Eye Viewing
Where the Animals Go: Tracking Wildlife with Technology in 50 Maps and Graphics
By James Cheshire & Oliver Uberti
Particular Books 174pp £25
James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti’s enchanting and exhilarating annotated atlas of animal movements – tracked across countries and continents by tag and collar, radar and satellite – is a product of ‘big data’ methodology. Although obtained at a considerable remove, the perspectives the data provide often bring us closer to each individual creature than we could imagine.
Studies of wildlife more often than not begin with the close study of a few individuals and from there extrapolate conclusions about a wider population – how different, after all, can one bird, mammal or insect be from another of the same species? The remarkable advance of tracking technology has allowed researchers to flip this approach on its head. A study of Kenyan olive baboon troops by Margaret Crofoot and her team at the University of California, Davis, considered first the patterns made on a map by the animals’ movements – tracked, in the baboons’ case, by twenty-five GPS collars, each logging a data point every second – and then the implications of each individual animal’s movements on the troop as a whole. To the researchers’ surprise, the troop’s collective movements on their daily forages were found to be influenced as much by females and juveniles as by dominant males, which is not typically the case with feeding and mating.
It’s the researchers who anchor the raw data to animal populations on the ground. In the first place, most of the studies in Where the Animals Go require hands-on contact with the subject species. Collaring and tagging are intimate operations. Whether or not the researchers give the animals
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
Of the siblings Gwen and Augustus John, it is Augustus who has commanded most attention from collectors and connoisseurs.
Was he really the finer artist, asks Tanya Harrod, or is it time Gwen emerged from her brother’s shadow?
Tanya Harrod - Cut from the Same Canvas
Tanya Harrod: Cut from the Same Canvas - Artists, Siblings, Visionaries: The Lives and Loves of Gwen and Augustus John by Judith Mackrell
literaryreview.co.uk
As Apple has grown, one country above all has proved able to supply the skills and capacity it needs: China.
What compromises has Apple made in its pivot east? @carljackmiller investigates.
Carl Miller - Return of the Mac
Carl Miller: Return of the Mac - Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company by Patrick McGee
literaryreview.co.uk
We are saddened to hear of the death of Edmund White.
We've lifted the paywall on Richard Davenport-Hines's 2014 review of White's Paris memoir.
Richard Davenport-Hines - Scenes from a Literary Life
Richard Davenport-Hines: Scenes from a Literary Life - Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris by Edmund White
literaryreview.co.uk