Mapping islands, electric travel and West Coast wildfires

Over the last month we've published cangeo.ca stories on wildlife and the environment and on how COVID-19 continues to affect our natural world.

We've also published the special digital edition of our Wildlife Photography issue, and are soon to publish a special collector's edition Group of Seven issue.

Keep your eye on our social media channels for all our upcoming stories.

Photos of the West Coast wildfires from the Can Geo photo community

While wildfires rage on the west coast of the United States, Canadians continue to see (and photograph) the effects in their own front yards. Residents saw bright orange skies along with heavy smoke cover as a result, and many of our Can Geo photo community used their cameras to capture these rare sights.

See more photos here.

Exclusive Q&A with Long Way Up's Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman

Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman, stars of Apple TV’s new series Long Way Up, with tips on what to do — and not to do — when travelling electric.

Long Way Up marks Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman’s return to the screen more than a decade after their previous “Long Way” adventure. The series follows the Scottish film star and his actor friend as they attempt to travel 20,000-plus kilometres from Ushuaia, Argentina all the way up to Los Angeles, California. The catch: They are attempting the journey, through some of the most difficult regions on the planet, using electric motorcycles. And, to add to the odds, the bikes are a first-of-their-kind prototype. This is their first long-haul test.

Read the Q&A.

Mapping Canada's 75 biggest islands

It is always part of the cartographer’s work-flow to classify and categorize the big messy world into orderly and comprehensible pieces of "data." If we are to show cities and towns on a map as dots, we must first be able to define what these are. In this instance, we could define a city or town as a relatively dense area of human settlement that has a name. Easy enough. And though it is similarly easy to say that islands are pieces of land surrounded entirely by water, the tricky part lies in applying this definition to mapping data.

Read more on cartographer Chris Brackley's mapping process here.