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Q4. What are Some Contemporary Issues Surrounding the Wet Tropics? Click here to view a page with tips on how to complete the activities Question 4 Activity 4.5: In the Rainforest Of course humans have an impact on the Wet Tropics! This is a bit of a no-brainer! But, it’s not often that we go into the rainforest and really look for human impact. The goal of this activity is to complete a transect study that examines human impact on the forest. Travel to a patch of rainforest that is close to human habitation. Create a transect line of approximately 100 metres. A transect is a path along which you record or count the occurrences of something. The object of your transect study is to count the number of things you find that show that humans have impacted on the rainforest. For instance, if the transect crosses a road you would need to record the road (a human impact). Other items you might find are bottles, rubbish, human shoe prints, cigarette butts, tent pegs, markers on trees, tracks or fences. Record your data in the table below:
Conduct a survey of students and teachers from your school about their opinions on either the ‘loving the rainforest to death’ issue, the Kuranda Range Road upgrade or another local issue. You’ll need to be very familiar with each issue to ensure you ask the right kinds of questions. Try to include at least 10 questions in your survey. A survey tries to capture people’s attitudes towards certain things. There are many ways to capture this data. Try the following two data collection methods: The Lickert Scale
The Wet Tropics isn’t the only World Heritage Area attempting to sustainably manage visitor numbers. In fact, nearly all of Australia’s World Heritage Areas are dealing with this issue. But visitors aren’t the only issues facing Australia’s World Heritage Areas. Go to the following sites. Each site provides details of some management issues that each World Heritage Area is dealing with. Once you’ve had a look at some of the issues (found under the heading Management Constraints), fill in the table at the bottom of the page. Great
Barrier Reef
4.8 The World The site lists “armed conflict and war, earthquakes and other natural disasters, pollution, poaching, uncontrolled urbanisation and unchecked tourist development” as the major threats to the 34 World Heritage sites in danger. On the map below indicate where each World Heritage site in danger is located. You’ll need to use an atlas to determine which continent each country is in, or you can go to the Jacaranda Atlas website Tally how many World Heritage sites in danger are found on each continent.
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