Visualizing animal impacts on the landscape: Remote sensing in the geography classroom
Butler DR. 2002. Visualizing animal impacts on the landscape: Remote sensing in the geography classroom. Geocarto International. 17(4):69-76
The impact of animals upon the landscape, through such actions as trampling, feeding, burrowing, mounding, and dam building, is a topic of interest in university geography classrooms. However, the relatively fine-scale nature of most such impacts precludes its examination via remote sensing. Nevertheless, remote sensing of many types of animal impact is possible, and in this paper I illustrate several such examples, primarily drawn from free-access sites on the World Wide Web, using a variety of remote sensing platforms. Instructors of physical geography or resource/land use management courses can thus introduce a variety of remote sensing concepts and imagery types in their classrooms while at the same time examining the role of animals on the landscape.