Geography Notes Form 3 Pdf Download ~REPACK~
Vincenza Speranza
An ecosystem is a geographic area where plants, animals, and other organisms, as well as weather and landscape, work together to form a bubble of life. Ecosystems contain biotic or living, parts, as well as abiotic factors, or nonliving parts. Biotic factors include plants, animals, and other organisms. Abiotic factors include rocks, temperature, and humidity.
Every factor in an ecosystem depends on every other factor, either directly or indirectly. A change in the temperature of an ecosystem will often affect what plants will grow there, for instance. Animals that depend on plants for food and shelter will have to adapt to the changes, move to another ecosystem, or perish.
Ecosystems can be very large or very small. Tide pools, the ponds left by the ocean as the tide goes out, are complete, tiny ecosystems. Tide pools contain seaweed, a kind of algae, which uses photosynthesis to create food. Herbivores such as abalone eat the seaweed. Carnivores such as sea stars eat other animals in the tide pool, such as clams or mussels. Tide pools depend on the changing level of ocean water. Some organisms, such as seaweed, thrive in an aquatic environment, when the tide is in and the pool is full. Other organisms, such as hermit crabs, cannot live underwater and depend on the shallow pools left by low tides. In this way, the biotic parts of the ecosystem depend on abiotic factors.
The whole surface of Earth is a series of connected ecosystems. Ecosystems are often connected in a larger biome. Biomes are large sections of land, sea, or atmosphere. Forests, ponds, reefs, and tundra are all types of biomes, for example. They're organized very generally, based on the types of plants and animals that live in them. Within each forest, each pond, each reef, or each section of tundra, you'll find many different ecosystems.
The biome of the Sahara Desert, for instance, includes a wide variety of ecosystems. The arid climate and hot weather characterize the biome. Within the Sahara are oasis ecosystems, which have date palm trees, freshwater, and animals such as crocodiles. The Sahara also has dune ecosystems, with the changing landscape determined by the wind. Organisms in these ecosystems, such as snakes or scorpions, must be able to survive in sand dunes for long periods of time. The Sahara even includes a marine environment, where the Atlantic Ocean creates cool fogs on the Northwest African coast. Shrubs and animals that feed on small trees, such as goats, live in this Sahara ecosystem.
Even similar-sounding biomes could have completely different ecosystems. The biome of the Sahara Desert, for instance, is very different from the biome of the Gobi Desert in Mongolia and China. The Gobi is a cold desert, with frequent snowfall and freezing temperatures. Unlike the Sahara, the Gobi has ecosystems based not in sand, but kilometers of bare rock. Some grasses are able to grow in the cold, dry climate. As a result, these Gobi ecosystems have grazing animals such as gazelles and even takhi, an endangered species of wild horse.
Even the cold desert ecosystems of the Gobi are distinct from the freezing desert ecosystems of Antarctica. Antarcticas thick ice sheet covers a continent made almost entirely of dry, bare rock. Only a few mosses grow in this desert ecosystem, supporting only a few birds, such as skuas.
Threats to Ecosystems
For thousands of years, people have interacted with ecosystems. Many cultures developed around nearby ecosystems. Many Native American tribes of North Americas Great Plains developed a complex lifestyle based on the native plants and animals of plains ecosystems, for instance. Bison, a large grazing animal native to the Great Plains, became the most important biotic factor in many Plains Indians cultures, such as the Lakota or Kiowa. Bison are sometimes mistakenly called buffalo. These tribes used buffalo hides for shelter and clothing, buffalo meat for food, and buffalo horn for tools. The tallgrass prairie of the Great Plains supported bison herds, which tribes followed throughout the year.
Human Ecosystem
"Human ecosystem" is the term scientists use to study the way people interact with their ecosystems. The study of human ecosystems considers geography, ecology, technology, economics, politics, and history. The study of urban ecosystems focuses on cities and suburbs.
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Delta Blues
Delta blues is a style of music developed by African American artists living and performing in the Mississippi Delta region of the southern United States. The Mississippi Delta is actually a floodplain between two rivers in northwestern Mississippi, the Mississippi and the Yazoo, and it is sometimes referred to as the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta.
Slide guitar is one of the standard instruments used by Delta blues musicians, while familiar topics include poverty and injustice. Robert Johnson, widely recognized as one of the greatest guitarists of all time, played the Delta blues. Listen to Robert Johnson here.
Today, geography is an extremely broad discipline with multiple approaches and modalities. There have been multiple attempts to organize the discipline, including the four traditions of geography, and into branches.[11][3][12] Techniques employed can generally be broken down into quantitative[13] and qualitative[14] approaches, with many studies taking mixed-methods approaches.[15] Common techniques include cartography, remote sensing, interviews, and surveys.
Geography is a systematic study of the Earth (other celestial bodies are specified, such as "geography of Mars", or given another name, such as areography in the case of Mars), its features, and phenomena that take place on it.[16][17][18] For something to fall into the domain of geography, it generally needs some sort of spatial component that can be placed on a map, such as coordinates, place names, or addresses. This has led to geography being associated with cartography and place names. Although many geographers are trained in toponymy and cartology, this is not their main preoccupation. Geographers study the Earth's spatial and temporal distribution of phenomena, processes, and features as well as the interaction of humans and their environment.[19] Because space and place affect a variety of topics, such as economics, health, climate, plants, and animals, geography is highly interdisciplinary. The interdisciplinary nature of the geographical approach depends on an attentiveness to the relationship between physical and human phenomena and their spatial patterns.[20]
Geography as a discipline can be split broadly into three main branches: human geography, physical geography, and technical geography.[3][22] Human geography largely focuses on the built environment and how humans create, view, manage, and influence space.[22] Physical geography examines the natural environment and how organisms, climate, soil, water, and landforms produce and interact.[23] The difference between these approaches led to the development of integrated geography, which combines physical and human geography and concerns the interactions between the environment and humans.[19] Technical geography involves studying and developing the tools and techniques used by geographers, such as remote sensing, cartography, and geographic information system.[24]
Narrowing down geography to a few key concepts is extremely challenging, and subject to tremendous debate within the discipline.[25] In one attempt, the 1st edition of the book "Key Concepts in Geography" broke down this into chapters focusing on "Space," "Place," "Time," "Scale," and "Landscape."[26] The 2nd edition of the book expanded on these key concepts by adding "Environmental systems," "Social Systems," "Landscape," "Nature," "Globalization," "Development," and "Risk," demonstrating how challenging narrowing the field can be.[25]
Another approach used extensively in teaching geography are the Five themes of geography established by "Guidelines for Geographic Education: Elementary and Secondary Schools," published jointly by the National Council for Geographic Education and the Association of American Geographers in 1984.[27][28] These themes are Location, place, relationships within places (often summarized as Human-Environment Interaction), movement, and regions[28][29] The five themes of geography have shaped how American education approaches the topic in the years since.[28][29]
For something to exist in the realm of geography, it must be able to be described spatially.[30][31] Thus, space is the most fundamental concept at the foundation of geography.[5][6] The concept is so basic, that geographers often have difficulty defining exactly what it is. Absolute space is the exact site, or spatial coordinates, of objects, persons, places, or phenomena under investigation.[5] We exist in space.[7] Absolute space leads to the view of the world as a photograph, with everything frozen in place when the coordinates were recorded. Today, geographers are trained to recognize the world as a dynamic space where all processes interact and take place, rather than a static image on a map.[5][32]
Place is one of the most complex and important terms in geography.[7][8][9][10] In human geography, place is the synthesis of the coordinates on the Earth's surface, the activity and use that occurs, has occurred, and will occur at the coordinates, and the meaning ascribed to the space by human individuals and groups.[31][9] This can be extraordinarily complex, as different spaces may have different uses at different times and mean different things to different people. In physical geography, a place includes all of the physical phenomena that occur in space, including the lithosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere.[10] Places do not exist in a vacuum and instead have complex spatial relationships with each other, and place is concerned how a location is situated in relation to all other locations.[33][34] As a discipline then, the term place in geography includes all spatial phenomena occurring at a location, the diverse uses and meanings humans ascribe to that location, and how that location impacts and is impacted by all other locations on Earth.[9][10] In one of Yi-Fu Tuan's papers, he explains that in his view, geography is the study of Earth as a home for humanity, and thus place and the complex meaning behind the term is central to the discipline of geography.[8]
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