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Discuss the Connectivity of Water, Mineral & Soil Resources
This week, you have learned about our physical natural resources (water, soil & minerals) and how our lifestyle choices have put the health and availability of these resources in jeopardy. Now, it's time to move from an individual focus on each resource to the inter-relatedness across these three sources. Using publicly available data and/or figures from this week’s readings, discuss how these three physical resources are all linked to each other. What role have our choices played in declining water access and soil-mineral depletion? Finally, what practices can we adopt to improve the long-term sustainability of soil health, in particular?
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Discuss Declining Pollinators and Other Ecosystem Services
This week, you have learned about our living natural resources (biota), biogeochemical cycles and how our lifestyle choices have disrupted various ecosystem services, like pollination. For this discussion, please share your observations from the Week 6 - Eco Moment (Impact of Bee Losses) Xerces site you explored. Using reliable external sites and/or information presented this week from IPBES, investigate the financial investment we need to make in our pollinators now versus the costs we will have to pay in the coming decades if we fail to do so. Finally, compare pollination to another important ecosystem service of your choice with an emphasis on how declining biodiversity impacts your chosen service.
BELOW IS JUST NOTE FOR YOU TO HAVE A BETTER IDEA
Weekly Overview
Our living natural resources, namely the flora and fauna on this planet, are as important to our survival and success as the physical resources we explored last week. This week, we will examine the intersection between physical resources and biota through biogeochemical cycles and take a look at the unprecedented species and biodiversity losses we are currently experiencing in the Anthropocene. Such species loss is also associated with reduced ecosystem services, which are responsible for cleaning our water and air, protecting us from the ravages of harsh weather, and more.
We will take a close look at one particularly critical ecosystem service this week, namely pollination. The United Nations (UN) formed the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services ( IPBES ) in 2012, as an independent intergovernmental body, akin to the IPCC you learned about in Week 3 on climate change. The goal of IPBES is to support the science-policy interface for biodiversity and ecosystem services for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity, long-term human well-being and sustainable development. Finally, we will take an initial look at the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals ( SDGs ), which will be explored more fully in Week 8.
Weekly Learning Outcomes
1. Explain the concept of a biogeochemical cycle
2. Describe the natural cycles of carbon, water, and nitrogen and name some of the important ways our choices disrupt those cycles
3. Define biodiversity
4. Describe trends in declining biodiversity and examine how our choices exacerbate species extinction
5. Define ecosystem services and the important role they play in our survival and success
6. Examine pollination as a critical ecosystem service and how our choices are negatively impacting bees
Did you know that every third bite of food the average American takes is thanks to a bee?
Our learning resources this week highlight how global biodiversity is declining at an appalling rate, which is directly linked to the ecosystem services we unknowingly rely on every day, like bee pollination. In this week's Eco Moment, you will review how declining pollinator populations can impact your future grocery bill. A recent UN Report (IPBES 2017) valued global pollination services (by bees) at $235 billion-$577 billion (in 2015, United States dollars). Further, their assessment concluded that 75% of our food crops and nearly 90% of wild flowering plants depend at least to some extent on animal pollination and that a high diversity of wild pollinators is critical to pollination even when managed bees are present in high number.
Visit the bee-friendly tools by the Xerces Society available here: https://beebettercertified.org/
Explore the various impacts on bees featured on this website and be sure to view the photos of what our grocery store produce departments will look like in a world without bees. Scan species diversity of bees featured on the website and connect this diversity to the critical ecosystem service of pollination--both in agriculture and the wild. Share your observations in our discussion area this week ( Week 6 - Discuss Declining Pollinators and Other Ecosystem Services ).
Note that this week's Eco Moment does not require sharing data with the class
