Question

Human Impact on the Environment Assignment: Your assignment: You will need to find an article about the human impact on the environment. It can be at the local, state, national, or international level. You need to be able to summarize it for the class. These articles will be the basis of discussion during the next class period. If typing, your summary should be at least ½ of a page. If handwriting, it should be ¾ of a page. I do want to be able to review your original source so I need either the link or a hard copy of the news article. Please do not use Wikipedia; that’s not a “news source.” Please also don’t just type in “human impact on environment” and give me a summary of all the ways we impact the environment. What this assignment is supposed to do is have you focus on ONE aspect, ONE event, ONE way humans are impacting the environment. It could be a good thing—maybe we’ve saved some animals; maybe we’ve created a new national park or reserve; maybe we’ve created something to help organisms; etc. It could also focus on something negative- “look what we’ve destroyed”, “look what we’ve polluted”, “look what we are killing”, etc. The main thing is your article must show how humans have impacted the natural world (not the other way around). Additionally, you need to use a news source- not someone’s blog page, not Wikipedia, not some website that lists all the things humans are doing to the environment.

Answer 1

Here I am quoting authors on work:

Title: Abundance and diversity of soil invertebrates in annual crops, agroforestry and forest ecosystems in the Nilgiri
biosphere reserve of Western Ghats, India.

Authors: P. Mujeeb Rahman • R. V. Varma • G. W. Sileshi

Journal: Agroforest Syst

DOI 10.1007/s10457-011-9386-3

In this paper, how forest clearance and landuse landcover change affected soil biodiversity is studied and narrated well. Here impact of human beings on landuse change and how the landuse change affected soil biodiversity is summarized. The work is carried out in one of the hottest hotspot of the world, the western ghats, India.

Summary:

Biologically mediated soil processes rely
on soil biota to provide vital ecosystem services in
natural and managed ecosystems. However, land use
changes continue to impact on assemblages of soil
biota and the ecosystem services they provide. The
objective of the present study was to assess the effect
of land use intensification on the distribution and
abundance of soil invertebrate communities in the
Nilgiri, a human-dominated biosphere reserve of
international importance. Soil invertebrates were
sampled in 15 land use practices ranging from simple
and intensively managed annual crop fields and
monoculture tree plantations through less intensively
managed agroforestry and pristine forest ecosystems.
The lowest taxonomic richness was found in annual
crops and coconut monoculture plantations, while the
highest was in moist-deciduous and semi-evergreen
forests. With 21 ant species, agroforestry systems had
the highest diversity of ants followed by forest
ecosystems (12 species).