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