Arizona Envirothon 2007
Alternative/Renewable EnergyScientific Articles
Scientific articles can be excellent sources of actual data and broad concepts about an environmental issue. Scientific articles are usually peer reviewed by independent experts. Peer review doesn't necessarily guarantee that articles are free of errors, but it does lend substantial credibility to an article. Scientific articles range in scope from general reviews of an issue to specific research studies about a very small part of an issue. The links below cover that full range.
Note:
- Copyright: So called "fair use" of copyrighted material includes making it available to a limited number of other people without making a profit from it. Consequently, there's no charge for these scientific article links, which are pdf files and require Adobe to read and print, but they have been password protected. If you don't yet know the password to open the files and you're a participant in this year's Arizona Envirothon, please email Paul (address below) and request the magic word.
- Teachers and coaches: These articles are not terribly tough academically relative to typical science articles, but some do contain sections of statistics, etc., that might be difficult for high schoolers. It might be best for you to read these articles first and highlight the need-to-know stuff while blocking out any gory details of methods and quantitative analyses.
The articles:
- Arizona's Forest Resources, 1999: This is a must-read for Arizona Envirothon. This Forest Service publication documents important statistics about trees and forests of Arizona. At first glance, this is a huge document, but don't despair—you need read only pages 1-19; the rest is glossary and appendix stuff. I recommend focusing on the following figures and their meanings:
- Fig. 3: A state-wide forest vegetation map. Match this with a topo map of the state and make your own associations.
- Fig. 6: On the basis of acreage, what forest type dominates in Arizona, by far?
- Figs. 13 & 14: On the basis of total wood biomass, what forest type dominates in Arizona, by far?
- Fig. 21: Are Arizona's forests currently dieing out or growing more wood than ever?
- Ecosystem Goods and Services: Have you ever wondered, Why conserve natural ecosystems? What good is a forest, or a desert, or a wetland? In other words, why bother studying forestry in Envirothon? This publication, from the Ecological Society of America, our country's leading authority on things ecological, documents the benefits that we humans derive from healthy, intact ecosystems. It also estimates a dollar value on those goods and services, allowing the justification of practically any argument to conserve natural ecosystems. This is a must-read for Arizona Envirothon!
- Bioenergy, Global Warming, and Environmental Impacts: This 12-page article is loaded with nuggets of information and concepts about using wood biomass for alternative energy production.
- The Economics of Biomass in Industrialized Countries: an overview: This 10-page article is not quite as friendly to read as the previous one, but it presents an economic analysis of wood biomass burning that sort of argues against this strategy. However, this article was published in 1997 and made some predictions about what the price of oil wold be now. Check out Table 2 to see how wrong that estimate was. With oil being so much more expensive now, the economics are more favorable for biomass burning. By the way, OECD stands for "Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development" (rich, developed countries, like the US), and MTOE stands for "millions of tonnes of oil equivalent" (a lot of oil).
- Wood Biomass for Energy: This 3-page US Forest Service fact sheet corroborates information from other sources.
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Revised — January, 2007
URL: http://www.ltrr.arizona.edu/~sheppard/envirothon/scientificarticles.html
