Environmental Studies

This course examines the important role of fire in Australian landscapes. It covers how fire has shaped the diversity of life in Australia over millions of years, how people have been using fire to modify Australian landscapes for millennia, and how contemporary fire patterns influence human society and ecosystems. Topics include combustion and fire behavior, prediction of fire patterns, fire ecology of plants and animals, Indigenous burning, climate change and future fire, and approaches for using fire, managing fire and sustaining biodiversity.

This course is directed at understanding specific air quality issues in 3 themes: 1) at the global 2) regional and 3) local (urban) scale. At each scale, the focus is understanding the life cycle of natural and anthropogenic air pollutants, i.e., the processes behind emission, transport in the atmosphere, chemical conversions, and deposition on the land/ocean surface. The role of meteorology on air pollution mixing and transport is explicitly explained on each scale. The course pays attention to the effects on human and environmental health, as well as the feasibility of alternatives and the efficiency of regulation and policy. On the global scale, the focus is on tropospheric chemistry, the greenhouse effect, and stratospheric ozone. On the regional scale, the focus is on the deposition of air pollutants (clouds, precipitation, wet deposition, dry deposition), acidification, and eutrophication, with ample examples by means of the nitrogen cycle. At the local scale, the focus is on traffic and industrial emissions, the role of vegetation, and photochemical smog. Each theme is completed with a tutorial, in which problem-solving is practiced as exam training.

The course examines key biogeographical and ecological topics from both physical and human perspectives. This interdisciplinary approach is essential for the understanding and management of environmental problems that involve biological diversity and ecological communities. The course provides students not just with an essential grounding in the fundamentals of biogeography and ecology, but also an appreciation of how this is mediated by society. These skills are valuable for both physical and human geographers and are a central facet of environmental geography.  Most specifically, the course focuses on biodiversity, ecological systems, and ecosystem services with a focus on current threats, management, and conservation. 

The earth’s atmosphere is a wonderfully vibrant environment full of fun scientific stories. The atmosphere shapes the quality of the air we breathe; interacts with other parts of the environment; and is a reservoir of key components of critical earth processes, including photosynthesis and climate change. This course focus on topics of atmospheric composition and structure; energy balance; weather systems; air pollution; greenhouses gases, and climate change.