Geography 430 is an active, creative learning community focused around understanding the changing relationships between people and their environments, the causes and consequences of environmental degradation, strategies for building a more sustainable world, and the methods and approaches that scholars have used to understand human-environment interactions. The primary course objectives are to help geographers, earth scientists, and other professionals to deepen their appreciation for the complexity of human-environment systems and to develop skills that allow them to interpret, analyze, and communicate effectively regarding human-environment interactions in their lives as students, professionals, and citizens.

This video features Katharine Hayhoe presenting a lively discussion of impacts that the Midwestern US is experiencing due to climate change. It steps through evidence for how climate change is affecting agriculture, tourism, drought and flood, water cycles and freshwater availability, the spread of invasive species and disease, as well as other topics.

This audio slideshow examines the changes in the ecosystem that will occur to the Arctic due to increasing temperatures and disappearing sea ice.

The main content objectives covered in this unit are the phenomena of global warming, carbon cycle, ocean acidification, and its impact on plants, animals, and the marine ecosystem. The main purpose of this is to provide the reader with the basic knowledge base about these processes and understand the main players that are responsible for them. Fossil fuel pollution by human activities is contributing to the increase in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Some of the CO2 is being absorbed by the oceans. This process increases the number of free hydrogen ions in the oceans, making the ocean water more acidic. This phenomenon is called ocean acidification. When oceans become acidic, they can negatively affect the plants, living organisms such as shell-forming organisms, and other marine life. The results of this process are devastating and this unit hopes to bring students’ attention to these dangers.

This activity relates water temperature to fishery health within inland freshwater watersheds as a way to explore how environmental factors of an ecosystem affect the organisms that use those ecosystems as important habitat.

This video features changes in the land, sea, and animals that are being observed by the residents of Sachs Harbour, Northwest Territories, Canada â many of whom hunt, trap, and fishâbecause of their long-standing and intimate connection with their ecosystem. Scientists interview the residents and record their observations in order to deepen our understanding of climate change in the polar region. Background essay and discussion questions are included.

In this lab activity, students use brine shrimp as a proxy for krill to study how environmental factors impact behavioral responses of krill in the unique environment of Antarctica.

This sequence of activities using real-world data to explain the importance of coral reefs and the relationship of coral reef health to the surrounding environment. Unit includes five activities.

This video is part two of a seven-part National Academies series, Climate Change: Lines of Evidence. The video outlines, with the use of recent research and historical data, how we know that the Earth is warming.

In Part A of this activity, students will learn about how sea ice forms and influences ocean currents around the globe. In Part B, they will look at how sea ice thickness changes over time. Finally, in Part C, students will use NSIDC sea ice index data to explore changes in sea ice extent on multiple time scales including months, years, and decades.

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In the first part of this lab, students learn about land ice and the processes and timescales involved in glaciation. In Part B, they use an online interactive to explore how glaciers provide scientists with evidence for climate change. Finally, students use image processing software to measure how much area a real glacier has lost over time due to rising temperatures.

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Stratified lakes exhibit vertical gradients in organisms, nutrients, and oxygen, which have important implications for ecosystem structure and functioning. Mixing disrupts these gradients by redistributing these materials throughout the water column. Consequently, it is critical to understand the drivers of lake mixing and thermal stratification, especially because of the sensitivity of lake thermal conditions to altered climate. In this module, students will explore spatial and temporal patterns of lake mixing using high-frequency temperature data from lakes around the world. They will also explore how increases in air temperature affect thermal stratification by interpreting output from a lake model. Project EDDIE modules are designed with an A-B-C structure to make them flexible and adaptable to a range of student levels and course structures.

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If you follow environmental news at all, you'll be familiar with the most common cause of extinction in the world today: habitat loss. Habitat destruction threatens the survival of some the world's most charismatic organisms animals like the giant panda, the Sumatran tiger, and the Asian elephant. Humans have encroached on the wilderness in order to farm, mine, log, and build, and in the process, we've pushed the natural inhabitants of those areas into smaller and smaller refuges. Making matters worse, global climate change caused by our production of greenhouse gases is altering the environments within those refuges, forcing species to contend with new challenges. While these might seem like entirely modern problems, recent research indicates that's not the case and that current levels of habitat loss and climate change could have devastating consequences.

The Lifestyle Project is a way for students to learn about environmental alternatives by modifying their own lifestyles. It is a three-week exercise for students to reduce their impact on the environment by changing the way in which they live from day to day. The project has fairly rigid parameters, allowing students to achieve a gradual but definitive change in their everyday habits. Students choose three categories from a list of six: heat, garbage, electricity and water, driving, eating, and activism. For each category the rules are clearly defined, such as turning down the heat three degrees or eliminating the use of the car. Each week the project becomes more rigorous, because students will have to meet the requirements more frequently. They write about their experiences in journals, which are incredibly insightful, illustrating just how profoundly the project affects them.

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Interactive map tool to assess how rising stream temperatures could affect native fish of the Northwest. Lesson concepts include the relationship between water temperatures, dissolved oxygen levels in streams, and the impacts of changing temperatures on native fish. Focused skills include use of an interactive map to assess how stream temperatures are expected to change and the impacts on native fish.

In this video segment adapted from the Alaska Native Heritage Center, discover the connections between Alaska Native subsistence culture and the natural cycle of the seasons.

This video highlights specific climate change-related phenomena that are threatening the flora and fauna of Yellowstone National Park.

This video and accompanying essay review the impacts of rising surface air temperatures and thawing permafrost on ecosystems, geology, and native populations in Alaska.

In this learning activity, students analyze an actual dataset of the influence of temperature on tree growth. They use mathematical and statistical concepts like slope equations and lines of best fit to determine the relationship. They are then asked to make predictions about future tree growth under different greenhouse gas emissions, interpreting data from climate models to make these predictions.

Students explore paleoclimate of the Quaternary Period by working with marine oxygen-isotope data from Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) core 677.

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)