UNIT No.
#1 - #2 - #3

Interactions Among Driving Forces, Proximate Sources, and the Impacts of Land Use/Land Cover Change--Answers to Activities

Activity 1.1 Taking Good Notes

Encourage students to make note-taking a habit. Explain to them how it aids general comprehension, memory, and their degree of preparedness for classes and exams.

If students are new to note-taking on readings (or lectures) you may want to invest some time early on to practice this skill with them. It will pay off over the course of the class and students' entire college career. You may ask them to hand in their notes and return them with comments on what students did well, what they need to improve on, what they missed, what may have been too detailed. It is especially important to help them to discern and paraphrase the main argument of the paper, get a sense for where the author is coming from, and find some short phrase or clue by which students will be able to remember the paper and what it was about.

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Activity 1.2 Before You Lived Here

Be sure that students grasp the fundamental difference between the two basic concepts:

Land Use -- is the way in which, and the purpose for which, human beings employ the land and its resources (after Meyer 1995).

Pasture
Roads
Vineyards

Land Cover -- describes the physical state of the land surface (after Meyer 1995).

Deciduous forest
Rivers
Pavement

Assess students by the effort and variety of resources they use to find out about the land use history of their local area. Back to TOP

Activity 1.3 Reading Land Use/Land Cover Maps

The specific results of this exercise depend entirely on the maps available at your institution. In student responses look for their ability to distinguish land cover from land use. If you use the Brazil maps (Supplementary Activities) - the one on the left is the land use map - the one on the right is the land cover map. Go from group to group and discuss with them items that are questionable.

Questions like "What does the land look like?" or "What is it used for?" might help them to find the answers to the questions they have themselves. Encourage group discussion and cooperation (see Notes on Active Pedagogy for hints to encourage cooperative learning).

During the testing phase, some students found little challenge in the Brazil maps. If your students feel the same way, you could use the Brazil maps simply in preparation for more the more complex maps that you find among your own resources.

Be flexible in accepting answers to the first version of this activity. The main point is that students distinguish the two concepts clearly.

In response to the question "when does an environmental change become global?," students should mention the magnitude or scale of causes, impacts, and required responses to environmental change. Students should also recall the definitions of systemic and cumulative change which imply different causes and venues of global change. It may be helpful to ask students to name an environmental change that is not global, e.g., drilling an oil well, or building a seawall.

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Activity 1.4 Linking Regional Land Use/Cover and Global Change

The emphasis here is on the term Alinking.@ One of the main goals of this exercise, and of Active Learning Modules on the HDGC in general, is that students are able to cognitively connect between local (i.e., their own) and regional activities and global-scale environmental changes, and vice versa.

Conceptually, they should refer in their answers to:

the human driving forces (or macro forces),
the proximate sources of change,
the types of global changes to be expected, and
in particular, the two graphs linking these concepts, one general, the other specific to LULC change,

(all contained in the Background Information, Unit 1). Back to TOP

Activity 1.5 Field Trip: The Changing Landscape

Field trips can fill abstract terms with meaning and relevance. We recommended that you fit a field trip into the course at some point, if at all possible.

Check students' field notes for their understanding of the major sites you visited and the concepts you explained there.

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Activity 1.6 Film: "Spaceship Earth"

A film might be used in place of, or in addition to, the field trip to get students engaged with the subject matter. Follow your intuition to determine what kind of film your class might respond to most positively (the film must not necessarily be educational in its primary intent; it could simply be a film that gets students interested in global change, as via films on the potential or actual impacts of deforestation, desertification, climate change, etc.). Back to TOP

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Last Revised: 2/18/00 Robert E. Ford rford@igc.org