H1 Natural Environments Detailed Subject Notes 2019

Description

Quality, detailed up-to-date subject notes covering 11 weeks and 20 lectures. Also contains glossaries of key terms for each lecture and an index of the content of each lecture. Topics covered: • Definitions and importance of sustainability and resilience in ecosystems • Natural environment themes and traits • Rate of change in different system sizes • Landscape attributes • Compositional and mechanical layers of the earth • Theory of plate tectonics, plate motions, plate boundaries and interiors, and the major tectonic plates • Earth’s major structural features • Composition of the earth • Minerals and mineral structure • Classes of rock (igneous, metamorphic, sedimentary) their characteristics • The rock cycle • Landforms and how they form • The different types of volcanoes • Tectonic processes • Landscape processes • Different types of weathering • Drivers of landscape change • Types of erosion • Fates of weathering products • Types of mass wasting • Formation and importance of soil • Soil components • Describing soil in the field • Why and how soils differ • Weather vs climate • Climate factors • Earth’s tilt and the seasons • Earth’s climate cells • La Nina and El Nino and their impacts • The Indian Ocean Dipole • Climate Change • Fluvial landforms and fluvial erosion and deposition • Floodplain features and formation • Importance of rivers, their different courses, their formation and their rejuvenation • Aeolian processes and land formation • Different forms of aeolian erosion • Land resource issues and resilience risks • Coastal processes • Landscape ecology, definition, components and concepts • Endemism • Landforms local to Melbourne • Regional landforms • Soils in different climates • Concept of Terroir and its importance in vineyards • Biodiversity and its importance • Soil and soil health • Catchments and the different inputs to catchments • Metathinking, anthropocentrism, and ecocentrism • Production in the Mallee Land capability, land capability assessment, land suitability, land capabi