About how much of the global land use is for high-quality"cropland"? Where are these croplands usually found and how is this threatened by urban growth.

In Canada, 7% of the best ag land was lost to new urban growth. Is this 7% of the total land area, or 7% of what proportion of the area? Why does this make a difference.

For comparison, where are the highest quality agricultural lands in Oregon and are these lands threatened?

Although many of us might not like super-sized cities, what are some of the environmental and ecological benefits from having people live more in cities? Explain for example, less sprawl, recycling, emissions control, and other environmental impacts.

Megacities and urban areas are growing around the world. What proportion of the world's population live in cities. What are the five largest cities in the world. What are the five largest cities in the "West"?

see below under analysis and synthesis

 

Define "sprawl"

What are the 6 interacting factors that promoted sprawl? In your own words, describe the difference between having interacting factors and a set of individual causes. Explain how these factors work together. What does this complexity mean for reversing sprawl? (this is a key question -- don't ignore.)

List several extractive and non-extractive uses of forests. How does using extractive of non-extractive approaches to forests relate to the other services forests provide (such as clean, year-round water)?

Chapter 12: Multiple Perspectives Framework

The major steps in the framework are to gather information, use multiple perspectives to get more information, interview local experts, analyze the structure of the information you have and put this toward adaptive management solution.

Describe how the viewers are used to create narratives. Make up an example or using one viewer to describe a problem.

What is meant by a "salient feature" of a viewer?

According to this approach, is it better to get ambiguous results in the first phases. Why?

Chapter 13: Innovation

What is the "ingenuity gap"? What are unintended consequences?

Describe how technological and institutional innovation need to go together and give an example.

arable land:

Explain why most of the world's countries with high percentage of arable land are 1) in the N hemisphere and 2) in the temperate zone. This is not an historical accident.

causes of land use change (important):

What are the major factors that lead to land use change and what are some examples of "paths" that these changes take.

How does understanding that there are limited paths, help address this problem?

urbanization (less important):

What's the relationship between urbanization and the demographic transition we talked about before.

What are some environmental effects from urbanization.

Sprawl - skip, this is an old link

smart growth (medium importance):

What are the goals of smart growth?

what are the environmental benefits of smart growth?

(Why do you think that I think the term "smart growth" is stupid?)

Ingenuity Gap: Explain how we are creating problems faster than we are creating solutions.

 

Freshwater ecosystems of the World:

What do they list as the 6 categories of threats to freshwater ecosystems? What is the difference between "large cites" and "urban land cover"? What is included in the "human footprint"?

Choose several regions of the world that you know something about and compare the impact of land use on freshwater ecosystems (using this tool). Does the desription make sense to you or does it just raise more questions. (For example compare the impact diagram of the Columbia Basin to the Oregon and Colorado River Basin. Once you figure out how to zoom in, it's pretty easy to select these basins.

Video 1 - Paving Farmland

Why are they trying to save farmland? What are the arguments against legislating against paving farmland? Do you think there's a flaw in the argument that city people have more capital than farmers (I really mean, what is the flaw?)

Video 2 - Ted Talk by Eric Burlow

How does Burlow argue that looking at the whole network of interactions actually simplify finding solutions? How is this similar to our approach of using multiple perspectives to create a narrative?

accompanying blog - interesting background for how he got into this area, from ecological models to social/ecological networks

 

Analysis and Synthesis questions:
These are the type of manipulations you should be able to perform; parse out the parts of the question, remember or find concepts that are useful, and then put those together into a coherent answer.

This is a 3 point question on the quiz, so it's worth thinking about.

Urban growth. It's not just the population of the city but the footprint. Translate that point into our I = PAT framework. What are technologies that could human impact more per person in an urban area than in a rural area? Use this framework to compare a big rich city (economically stable) to a city with slums. What are potential negative impacts of a large poor population that could be mitigated with technology?

Land use changes in the Amazon have lead to big impacts on the environment and ecology. What do you think (from the on-line reading) were underlying global driving factors and what were the more localized, proximal causes? What strategies do you think you need to address these causes at different scales?