NATURAL ENVIRONMENTS

PART ONE:

GEOGRAPHICAL CHARACTERISTICS

To correctly identify natural environments you need their geographical characteristics such as:

• SOILS

• CLIMATE

• TOPOGRAPHY

• NATURAL VEGETATION

GO OUTSIDE!!• Take the kids outside!• I go out to the trees just

outside my room. I get the kids to “touch and feel” and tell me how the soil feels in their hands, tell me what the weather is general like here this time of the year, tell me what the shape of the ground is like and what trees we are looking at.

SOILS• TYPE• ORIGIN (HOW WERE

THEY MADE)• TEXTURE• PH- ACIDIC, ALKALINE

OR NEUTRAL• WATER CONTENT• MINERAL CONTENT• Literally the foundations of

the environment because it dictates what will grow= FERTILITY

CLIMATE• Average temperature• Average rainfall• Patterns over time and

seasons. A summary or judgement about whether a place is dry, cold, wet or hot in general or at certain times of the year.

TOPOGRAPHY• The shape of the land.• The up and down bits!• Is it flat or hilly or

steep• “YMCA”- arm

movements to match the words steep, flat, undulating-DO IT DURING THE EXAM TO REMEMBER!!

NATURAL VEGETATION

• BASE for the biosphere and what animal life can be supported by it.

• What is used for food and what for habitat.

• THEN you CAN DISCUSS INTRODUCED SPECIES later.

Its not enough to just know the ingredients!

• You also need to know the Processes which are:

• Erosion• Transportation• Deposition

Processes put simplyerosion Like a Bulldozer on

construction siteEg: rain, wind, human machines, animals digging or destroying.

Transportation Like a dump-truck taking dirt from the construction site

Eg: wind or flowing water carry dirt.

deposition The dump-truck empties its loads in layers at a new site

Eg: wind or water flow lessens enough to drop its load somewhere new.

CHANGEChange can be measured in the following ways:• Over time- short term eg: seasonal or disaster -long term eg: geological Mount St Helens 1923 and 1980• Over space: local, regional, international, global• Scale: size. Eg: how big?

Best shown as:• Before and after shots.