Environmental Change and Management - Challenges of an urban wetland

Take your Year 9 & 10 students into the largest stand of mangroves on the Parramatta River to assess the pressures of a highly urbanised wetland ecosystem at Sydney Olympic Park.

This hands-on field trip utilises a range of geographic skills, fieldwork techniques and spatial technologies (a GIS system) to assist students to understand environmental processes and interconnections in a coastal wetland ecosystem. Students will examine a range of water quality issues including pollutant types and point sources of pollution that have an impact on the protected wetlands that they enter. Students will observe first hand the adaptive management strategies that assist to reduce the impact of water pollution on wetland environments. They will also evaluate current management strategies and discuss the development of innovative new strategies to improve water quality and the health of this protected coastal wetland ecosystem.

(H2) Learning Outcomes

(H3) Syllabus information
Stage 5 Environmental Change and Management

(H3) Outcomes
GE5-2, GE5-3, GE5-4, GE5-5, GE5-7, GE5-8

(H3) Key Inquiry Questions

• How do environments function?
• How do peoples world views affect their attitudes to and use of environments?
• What are the causes and consequences of change in environments and how can this change be managed?
• Why is an understanding of environmental processes and interconnections essential for sustainable management of environments?

(H3) Content

• Environments
• Environmental change
• Environmental management
• Investigative study
• Investigate biophysical processes
• Investigate the causes, extent and consequences of the environmental change
• Investigate the management of the environmental change