Module 10 Learning Activity
- Let’s get personal with biodiversity. Create a system diagram that illustrates how one activity you do in your hometown that decreases biodiversity in the ecosystems near you.
- In a comprehensive paragraph: Think about the event you chose and explain its importance. Is the activity necessary or is it something that just makes life more convenient? Is the activity something unique to yourself or is something everyone in your hometown does(In other words is it an individual problem or a collective problem)? Explain how you would like to change your own actions or the actions of your peers to help increase or maintain biodiversity in your surrounding area.
Completing My Assignment
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2) As we learned in module 7 driving a personal car is definitely not necessary, with successful urban planning cars can become more of an annoyance than a useful method of transportation. I enjoy driving myself into the city because I do not enjoy relying on public transportation unless absolutely necessary. Since my hometown is an automobile suburb most people own cars and therefore prefer to drive into the city like myself. My hometown does have two train stations that have direct lines into many different parts of the city. Collectively as a town if we starting using the train to commute to the city it would effectively reduce the number of cars on the main highways. With less cars comes less traffic, not only will this make every driver super happy it will also reduce the need to build more highways and the pollution that is a result of driving fossil fuel powered vehicles. In addition, I also learned from my final project research the construction of roads produces a lot of pollution, avoiding this pollution is just another benefit of switching from cars to trains. This will allow the local wetlands to stay together as one large ecosystem, by keeping all species together will keep a large gene pool. An ecosystem with more genetic diversity will make it more resilient if the wetlands face a disturbance.
Hi Nick! My name is Sophie Greene. While I was scrolling through the different blog posts, yours caught my attention because of your system diagram. Like you, I included a diagram that illustrated an activity that I do that affects biodiversity. Your system diagram was really detailed and I thought it was great. Overall, I thought your post was really well done! Feel free to check out my blog post. Here is the link: http://sites.psu.edu/geog30/2016/04/12/module-10-sophia-greene/
Hi Nick! I think it was great to identify how an activity in your hometown could decrease biodiversity so you can work to improve on that activity. I think you created your assignment to where you would really have to think deeply to answer the questions which is great for critical thinking and the creativity of your own learning activity. Your system diagram really brings to life the fact that each one of us driving a car could lead to the extinction of species which I wouldn’t have realized. Using a train or even a bus would be a much better idea. Here’s a link to my blog http://geog030.dutton.psu.edu/2016/04/12/not-so-hot-biodiversity-hotspots/
Hi Nick, after reading what you wrote on your module project, I noticed that we wrote very similar things. While you decided to create a systems diagram on your hometown, I felt that paragraphs discussing specific examples worked better for my purposes. Also, I liked how you thought that decreased car use would cause less pollution, and cause less of a harm towards the biodiversity in your area. I suggested that my town could plant more trees or hold a standard in the area of trees to help maintain biodiversity.
You can read what I said in my blog post below.
http://geog030.dutton.psu.edu/2016/04/10/biodiversity-of-westfield/
Hi Nick, my name is Alyssa. I liked reading your post because I thought your systems diagram was very well done. I also like you idea of taking public transportation into the city a lot. Doing this certainly would cut down on the amount of pollution in the air and allow for more biodiversity in the area. I think it would be a great idea to try this out for a little. If you want to check out my post on the declining bee population, here’s the link: http://geog030.dutton.psu.edu/2016/04/10/bee-population-decline/