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=Welcome to the wiki of the course on //Global Change, Biodiversity, and Human Well-Being//= =of the University of Almería=

**By Domingo Alcaraz Segura and Javier Cabello**
Here you can find the objectives of the course, the material needed for the classes, and the evaluation criteria. This course is organized as a Problem-Based Learning process that also requires Collaborative Learning. This implies that at the beginning of the course the class will be given a problem (e.g. What planetary boundaries apply for the Andalusian drylands?) that the entire class must manage to solve by the end of the course. During the process, students should divide the overall problem into partial tasks or sub-problems that must be solved by different teams. Such teams will be responsible for developing a wiki / blog with the results for their partial assignments. By the end of the course, all work teams must put together and present in a wiki their partial solutions into a conjunct solution for the overall problem. The evaluation will be based on: 1) Each individual-student wiki/blog, the team's wiki/blogs, and the class wiki should summarize all the learning and results achieved during the course; and 2) a presentation to the rest of the class summarizing the initial problem and the suggested solutions.


 * 1) **Background and Objectives of the course**
 * 2) **Assignments**
 * 3) **Materials and data sources**
 * 4) **Evaluation**
 * 5) **Course and students' blogs**

=**Bienvenido a la wiki de la asignatura [|Cambio Global, Biodiversidad y Bienestar Humano]**= =**de la [|Universidad de Almería]**=

**Por Javier Cabello y Domingo Alcaraz Segura**
Aquí puedes encontrar los objetivos del curso, el material necesario para las clases, y los criterios de evaluación. La asignatura está organizada como un proceso de Aprendizaje Basado en Problemas, lo que también implica el aprendizaje colaborativo. Al comienzo del curso plantearemos un escenario (por ejemplo, ¿Cuáles son los límites planetarios que pueden aplicarse a las zonas áridas de Andalucía?) que dará al hilo conductor que guiará el desarrollo de toda la asignatura. Durante el proceso, los estudiantes deberán ir identificando los problemas que subyacen al escenario planteado e ir resolviéndolos. Para ello se constituirán equipos que serán responsables de desarrollar un wiki/blog con los resultados de sus trabajos parciales. Al final del curso, todos los equipos de trabajo deberán reunir y presentar en la wiki sus soluciones parciales, para formular una solución de conjunto para el problema general. La evaluación se basará en: 1) Cada alumnos deberá abrir un blog o wiki en el que irá registrando su trabajo, y resumir los resultados del aprendizaje que ha identificado, y 2) una presentación ante el resto de la clase, o ante otro foro (probablemente alumnos de secundaria) que resuma el problema inicial y las soluciones sugeridas.


 * 1) **Antecedentes y objetivos de la asignatura.**
 * 2) **Tareas.**
 * 3) **Materiales y fuentes de datos.**
 * 4) **Evaluación.**
 * 5) **Blogs del curso y de los estudiantes.**

Brief introduction to the three concepts behind the title of this course
Global Change refers to the set of environmental impacts derived from the human appropriation of the Earth. Such impacts are caused by human activities that take place locally but whose added effects end up affecting the overall functioning of the Earth system.

Biodiversity is the degree of variation of life; the variability among living organisms from all sources including terrestrial, marine, other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part. This includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems (Convention on Biological Diversity, 1992). A comprehensive, and worth to read, approach to biodiversity is the one proposed by Reed Noss (1990) ([|Noss1990.pdf]).

Human well-being is not a synonym of wealth. The term well-being may lead to ambiguities since it depends on the perception of the people. According to the ecological economist Robert Costanza, while human well-being or quality of life have long been an explicit or implicit goals for humanity, adequate definitions and measurements have been elusive. At present this field is gaining much interest and diverse "objective" and "subjective" indicators from different disciplines and scales are being developed (e.g. Costanza et al. 2007). In environmental sciences, the concept of human well-being is tightly related to that of ecosystem services, the benefits that societies subtract from nature.

Here you can find a few slides illustrating the concepts behind the title of the course. media type="custom" key="10854686" width="48" height="48"

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