BIODIVERSITY Place a hula hoop (real or imagined) (a hula hoop is a 1 m diameter circle) around a vegetated area in your backyard (park, school).

a. How many species do you count? Describe them.

b.) Choose one of the species in the hula hoop. Describe its ecological niche.

c.) If you were to shade this area with an umbrella for a month, how would the species distribution change? Explain your reasoning.

d.) Name one species that you found in your hula hoop (could be the same or different from the one in (b)). How can you alter abiotic or biotic conditions to promote the success of that one species at the expense of the others?

CLIMATE

a.) What factors determine the mean (average) monthly temperatures at Great Blue Hill (located in Canton, MA, 6 miles southwest of Boston)? Which of these factors are regional factors? Which are global?

b.) Is this year's temperature record at Great Blue Hill an indication of Global Warming? Why or why not?

c.)What else would you need to know in order to answer (b) better?

3.) OZONE Below is a graph of total Global Ozone Change (red line) compared with a 15-year average (straight black line) taken before the recent decline. Explain how the manufacture and release of certain chemicals has influenced this graph. Specifically, why did total global ozone start decreasing around 1980? Why has it leveled off in the early 1990s? 

b.) Describe the processes that create a maximum of ozone around 15 km in the October average from 1967-1971. What were the processes that decreased these values at 15 km in the 1986 and 2001 curves?

4.) PLATE TECTONICS

a.) Why is there a bimodal distribution of elevations on the surface of the earth?

.) Why is there so much of the earth's surface at or near sea-level?