Through the interference of humans in the natural landscape, in the form of urbanisation, agricultural use, and mass tourism, the original image of landscape has been changed.
The Module "Land Use and Land Use Change" is dedicated to these changes.
In the framework of the global environmental and security observation - GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security - www.gmes.info) SEOS offers an introductory presentation of land use and land use change.
The Learning Module is Divided in Four Chapters
- Global land use change
- Urbanisation
- Syndromes of global change
- Mass tourism
The first and third chapter are occupied by the change of land use and the potential vegetation distribution as well as the human factor as the cause for land use, which for the GMES-user, can be especially interesting.
Chapter Overview
The first chapter - Global Land Use Change – deals with the causes of change in land use and presents the potential vegetation distribution of the land cover. Using data from different remote sensing satellites, future changes can be predicted. Extra materials provide explanations of the changes in concrete examples, such as fire clearance in the tropics, urbanisation processes in the case of selected mega cities and mass tourism in Tenerife.
The third chapter - Syndromes of Global Change – arrives at naturally and anthropologically caused causes of land use. It is a form of a notice about the global importance of clinical pictures of the earth. The processses have been distributed into three groups: use, change, and disposal. Detailed examples deal with the fire clearance in the tropics, the aggradation of the Aral sea, mining in Chile, and the green houses in Almeria. The goal is to present the complexity of world-wide environmental changes.
The Implementation of the Module "Land Use and Land Use Change"
The learning modules are openly accesable on the internet and created so that they are understandable without any explanations.
Individual chapters can be separately worked on, and offer the possibility to work in short phases, or to deal with the entire block of the theme.
In order to work with the learning module, no specific geographical expertise is needed. The contents are easily usable through the interactive work and do not need any explanation. New words will be defined in the beginning in the info boxes, the background information and interconnections are presented in the additional material. All of the contents are easy to understand and interconnected.
The learning modules will be prepared also in other European languages.
Goals
The learning modules will present the possibilities of earth observation with satellite images for different themes. Satellite images depict an unusual perspective, with which one can see the change of the ground view to the view from above.
Through the analysis of this data, the proccess of land use change will become visible. Additionally, geographical data provides another perspective of the complexity of environmental changes.
The goal is also to visualise and depict land use change through manifold maps, diagrams, and satellite images.
Additional Material
- Additional Material: Extra materials are sorted by chapter and offer extra pages with helpful information and definitions.
- Links: The list of suggested links to externa, information rich websites are sorted by chapter.
- References: Here is the exact information about the literature used in the text.
- Image Credits: Under the image credits link is all of the information about the image materials.
