Unit 26

 Human impacts on the water cycle: Land-use and land-cover changes

This unit gives a glimpse how humankind affects the water and energy cycle by land-cover and land-use changes.

rabbit fence Australia
Southwest Australia has been subject to considerable land use change since the late 1800s About 13 million hectares of native vegetation were converted to agriculturally used land. To protect the fields from rabbits a fence was built. Along the border of the natural and agricultural land convection with cloud formation occurs due to the different surface characteristics. Photo from Lyons et al. (1993)

Goals

The goal of this unit is to enhance and extend the concept that the energy and water exchange at the Earth-atmosphere interface depends on the characteristics at that surface. Thus, any land-cover or land-use have impacts on the water- and energy cycles, water and energy balances. These changes occur at different spatial and temporal scales with different magnitudes.

Satellite image of the Negrev showing the Egyptian Israelian border by different land-use. From https://www.science.co.il/israel/Satellite_images.php (2018)

After successful completion of this unit students will be able to

  • Discuss the impact of land-use/land-cover changes on the water cycle
  • Explain how land-cover changes lead to changes in precipitation, evapotranspiration, infiltration, percolation, groundwater recharge, and runoff
  • Use observational data to examine the impact of vegetation (all students) and vegetation type (graduate students)

Students’ tasks

  1. Watch this movie
  2. Take notes and fill out the questionnaire
  3. Download this Unit26 excel spread sheet.
  4. Solve the problems assigned at your class level in this Unit 26 Applications task sheet and submit your solutions prior to Thursday 2359 Alaska Time.

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