A couple of nights ago I opened Google Earth to search for something completely unrelated to what I’m sharing in this post. When I opened Google Earth I was greeted by a pop-up promoting a new-to-me file in Google Earth called Go On Safari. This file is a 66 placemark tour of wildlife in Africa.

The Go On Safari tour is based on the work of Mike Fay’s Africa Mega Flyover project which set out to study the impact of human activity on wilderness and wildlife. You can find the tour in Google Earth under the Primary Databases and Voyager layers.

Applications for Education
One of the great things about Google Earth is that it lets students see places in ways that paper maps and pictures cannot. Encourage students to dive deeper into the placemarks on this tour or others and see the landscape around the stops on the tour. Ask them to analyze how the physical and human geography has shaped places and impacted wildlife in an area.