Hello everyone. My name is Yuying Ren. I live in State College now, and I grew up in Beijing, China. I’m Sophomore, and majoring in Geography general option. I also plan to minor Economics and Geoscience. I take this course not only for my major requirements, but also for my personal interests. After I graduate, I hope I can work to dealing with environmental issues and natural hazards, or maybe urban planning. I hope I can travel around the world to visit different cities and regions, and to see how are the urban plannings and how the people live in there. Climate changes, environmental pollution, natural hazards, social problems, urban planning, these are the topics I’m interested in. I’d like to learn examples of solving environmental issues, and how much human can impacts the ecosystems. I will take advantage of GIS knowledge learned from other courses to help me better analyze sustainability and environmental issues.

After reading module 1, I’m thinking about urbanization. Urbanization is a kind of process that how much city or urban area develops. It is usually presented in the size of city or urban area, which is in regional scale. Urbanization is not a “bad” thing, but it can carry out issues, such as traffic jams, urban heat island effects, air pollution, unequal developments, poorness and richness, etc. For geography, these problems can be addressed on maps. For example, I can come up with a map showing the temperatures in an urban area and its surrounding rural area to analyze the urban heat island effects. By showing the map of land cover changes over a period of time, urbanization can be seen from the map. It’s important for people to know urbanization, because surrounding environment is changed by human activities. That’s anthropocene. From social science perspectives, that’s how human impacts on the environment.