Handbook : Unit informationEdith Cowan University

Faculty of Education and Arts

School: Communications and Arts

This unit information may be updated and amended immediately prior to semester. To ensure you have the correct outline, please check it again at the beginning of semester.

• Unit Title

  A Planet Transformed: Biogeography, Ecology and Conservation

• Unit Code

  GEO3124

• Year

  2015

• Enrolment Period

  1

• Version

  1

• Credit Points

  15

• Full Year Unit

  N

• Mode of Delivery

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Description

This unit explores the biogeography of Australia and its relationship to other Southern Hemisphere land masses. Themes will include water, fire, and people as locally determining agents which affect the past and present distribution of plants and animals and their relatives in Australia and overseas; the relative effects of Aboriginal land management, agriculture, mining and settlement on Australian biogeography; monitoring land use and environmental changes from satellite imagery. Practical skills developed through field-work projects on the impact of suburban encroachment on wetland reserves.

Equivalent Rule

Unit was previously coded GEO2104, GEO3104

Learning Outcomes

On completion of this unit students should be able to:

1. Define the concept of ecosystem and examine the interactions and limits of a selected example.
2. Demonstrate how human activity creates new ecosystems in all kinds of ways, by covering them over, by simplifying natural communities, and by replacing wild species with tame ones; apply biogeographical and ecological ideas to modern world problems
3. Develop an ability to collect, collate and analyse biogeographical data from maps, aerial photographs, satellite imagery, and field studies.
4. Discuss favourable contributing factors, and inhibiting or restraining causes, in the biogeography of continental and oceanic islands.
5. Display a knowledge of the history of ideas in biogeography.
6. Examine examples of disjunct biogeographical areas and attempt an interpretation of their origin and evolution.
7. Give evidence that they reached the required intellectual level by completing a major research essay on an approved topic.
8. Outline the role of biogeography in integrating the social and biological sciences, providing the essential link between human settlement and the land.
9. Outline why biogeographers are interested in the ecology of islands.
10. Show how biogeography is concerned with the study of the ecosystem, including people as an essential component rather than as an external influence.
11. Understand the importance of tectonics and paleoclimates as factors which have directed the evolution of Australian flora and fauna to their present condition.

Unit Content

1. Australian ecosystems and their modification by human activity, including Aboriginal land management, agriculture, mining and settlement.
2. Biogeographical and natural resource applications of satellite remote sensing.
3. Conservation of wetland reserves in urban areas.
4. Island biogeography theory and the design of ecological reserves - preservation of biotic diversity.
5. MacArthur and Wilson's "Theory of Island Biogeography", emphasising the careful collection of measurable data and relating it to a simple, elegant hypothesis.
6. Main effects of plate tectonics and continental drift on Australian biogeography - disjunct distributions in the Southern hemisphere.
7. Relationships between climate and vegetation in Australia.
8. The ecosystem as a geographic principle and method - geography and the ecological approach.
9. The phenomenon of endemism, providing examples of isolated environments in which speciation has occurred.
10. The way changing climates have influenced distributions - climatic relicts.

Additional Learning Experience Information

Lectures, tutorials, workshops and fieldwork.

Assessment

GS1 GRADING SCHEMA 1 Used for standard coursework units

Students please note: The marks and grades received by students on assessments may be subject to further moderation. All marks and grades are to be considered provisional until endorsed by the relevant Board of Examiners.

Text References

• ^ Nil.
• Drury, S. A. (1994). A guide to remote sensing: Interpreting images of the Earth. New York: Oxford Science.
• Hay, I. (1998). Communicating in geography and the environmental sciences. South Melbourne; Oxford University Press.
• Huggett, R. J. (2004). Fundamentals of biogeography. Oxon: Routledge.
• Worboys, G., Lockwood, M., & De Lacy, T. (2001). Protected area management: Principles and practice. South Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
• Knudtson, P., & Suzuki, D. (1994). Wisdom of the elders. St. Leonards: Allen and Unwin.
• Kohen, J. (1997). Aboriginal environmental impacts. Sydney: University Of New South Wales Press.
• New, T. R. (2000). Conservation biology: An introduction for southern Australia. South Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
• Simmons, I.G. (1996). Changing the face of the Earth: Culture, environment, history. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Inc.
• Cox, C.B., & Moore, P. D. (2003). Biogeography: An ecological and evolutionary approach. Oxford: Blackwell Science Ltd.
• Kirkpatrick, J. (1999). A continent transformed: Human impact on the natural vegetation of Australia. South Melbourne: Oxford University Press.

^ Mandatory reference

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