ERS215 Study Guide - Final Guide: Battletech, Nonpoint Source Pollution, Strategic Environmental Assessment

• School: University of Waterloo
• Department: Environment and Resource Studies
• Course: ERS215
• Professor: Denis Kirchhoff

Document Summary

They are changes in the environment caused by multiple interactions among human activities and natural processes that accumulate across space and time. Cumulative effects are the effects that people notice and as such, they are the effects of concern to people. People care about the quality of water and air, not about whether one source or another is responsible for contaminating water or air. Section 4 of the act the purposes of this act are: (i) to encourage the study of the cumulative effects of physical activities in a region and the consideration of those study results in environmental assessments. Time crowding: repeated frequently: ecosystem has no time to assimilate effects (e. g. , forest harvesting rates exceed regeneration) Space crowding: so close together that effects overlap (e. g. , multiple mine sites in one watershed) Time lags: activities generating delayed effects (e. g. , human exposure to pesticides) Fragmentation: changes in patterns and cycles (e. g. , multiple forest access roads cutting across wildlife habitat)