Geography 110H
Assignment 8
Due: Tuesday, Nov. 17

Increasingly these days we are hearing about global change and biodiversity. Before understanding the implications of global environmental change, we must first have some basic understanding of the spatial pattern of ecosystems and biomes and the relationship between climate and major plant and animal communities.

Your assignment this week, therefore, consists of two parts:

1.    First, identify a biome that interests you and select an actual site or place within that biome for further investigation. (By "site" I mean a real location on the globe, not a web site - that part comes later!) Using the textbook augmented by source materials from the Web, prepare a brief discussion of the biome describing the regional climate, the dominant vegetation in terms of structural type and seasonal pattern of growth; and primary productivity as compared with values for other biomes. Augment this discussion with a brief overview of the particular location you have picked (it could, for example, be one of the Long-Term Ecological Research sites on the bookmark list for this topic; there are also a variety of other locations from around the world that are attached to the list of bookmarks), including important aspects of soils or landforms that may be relevant.

2.    Identify a specific research question or environmental problem that is pertinent to your chosen location or to another location that catches your attention. This could be connected to the potential impacts of global change (ecosystem reponse to elevated CO2 levels, for example), some aspect of biogeochemical cycling, reconstruction of environmental history, or a problem resulting from human activities (that ravaged Indonesia last year, for example, have important implications for a particular set of ecosystems). There are also a range of basic research questions that are worth investigating  (look, for example, at the items listed under "Long-term experiments and monitoring" at the Luquillo Experimental Forest Long-Term Ecological Research site in Puerto Rico). Report briefly on the context of the question or problem and try to explain as clearly as you can what methodology is being used to study it and what research results are available so far. Many of the web sites provide references for published articles; you may choose to use one or two of these articles, if available in our library, as sources in preparing your summary. (In some cases this can turn out to be less frustrating than trying to gather the pertinent information from the web.)

Please come to class prepared to discuss your topic on Tuesday.