How do Humans Alter and Impact Biomes?

By the end of this lesson, you should be able to:

•Assess examples of human impact and alteration of biomes including oil and gas exploration, land conversion and deforestation.

Humans alter biomes in multiple ways

Humans alter and impact biomes in multiple ways, depending on the biome in question. Note that there are multiple classifications of biomes, but let's look at the tundra for our example.

While few humans live in the tundra compared to other biomes, humans are still changing this biome through anthropogenic climate change. Increasing temperatures are heavily felt towards the poles, which is where much of the tundra biome is located. Look at the heat map below. Areas with darker red have experienced higher temperatures than normal.

Also, let's look at oil and gas exploration and extraction. These resources are often found in, and are more easily extracted from the tundra biome. Large, mechanical drills are required to extract them from deep underground. They are then transported, often across long distances, to their destination.

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The Tundra Biome

Higher temperatures leads to longer growing seasons, less permafrost, less snow, and more vegetation in areas that were previously covered in snow and ice. These changes will have cascading effects on the type, distribution, and abundance of the flora and fauna of this region.

Humans alter biomes for the purpose of making them more suitable for living in or for agricultural or indutrial purposes.

For example, if we look at any of the forest biomes, humans alter these biomes by deforestation, accidentally introducing invasive species, hunting animals, polluting rivers, spraying pesticides, allowing livestock to graze in forests, and so forth.

These changes may be on a small scale, or they may be on a larger scale. For example, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has been to the extent that the tropical biome in this area is smaller in absolute size because of humans.

Tropical rainforest biome:

Task 1

Choose ONE of the following:

a) Watch the video to the left. Make a spider diagram of all of the different ways that humans alter biomes (approx 11 minutes).

b) Complete the Education Perfect Module on Human Impact on Terrestrial Biomes (approx 11 minutes).

Task 2 - Stop Motion

You are going to work individually or in pairs. Choose ONE way that humans alter biomes from the video you watched. Create a stop motion video that visually presents all the stages of this human alteration, from the land in its natural state, to the end result of the human alteration (e.g. pristine untouched rainforest to barren, sandy, desertified soil). Conduct further research into your chosen alteration if necessary.

Watch the two videos below to give you inspriration.
Think about and plan how you will create your stop-motion video.
Decide on the materials you will use and prep them (eg cut outs of trees, drawing that you will need).
Dowloand the stopmotion video app via to assist you in creating your video.
Upload it to the Google Classroom.

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