How is it going ladies and gentlemen? This is the third blog of the semester and I hope you are enjoying them because I enjoy keeping my fans updated on class. Biology and Human Concerns is going well and I am learning a lot. The latest thing I have learned was identifying trees. To begin, you start off with a dichotomous key, which is a key that asks broad questions about a subject until it narrows down to a simple answer. For instance. the first question you may ask when identifying a tree is whether or not it is a conifer or deciduous. After you answer that, you may ask if it is a simple or compound leaf and then whether it has alternate or opposite leaf arrangements. These are some of the steps that you may take when identifying a tree. but it may get much more complicated then that. Some trees have fruits or nuts, which makes those trees harder to identify. Another thing that makes tree identification difficult is the season of the year. The season will change the color of the leaves and this may confuse amateur tree identifiers. Since I just learned how to identify I do not have experience identifying tree throughout the year. I can identify most of the trees around Transy's campus without hesitation but when the winter comes around I may have difficulty. Well, I hope you guys enjoyed this blog.

What's up ladies and gentlemen? This is the second blog post of the semester for Biology and Human Concerns. Since last week, I have learned about the biodiversity and the natural regions of Kentucky. Biodiversity is the connection of species living and working together in an ecosystem. Each one of the species included within an ecosystem has its own function that it must complete in order for itself and a dependent species to survive. Relationships within an ecosystem vary from mutualistic where both species benefit from each other to parasitism where one species benefits and the other species is hurt. We also talked about the threats to biodiversity. One big threat that was mentioned in class was coal mining. Since our discussion on coal mining, I strongly believe that coal mining is one of the leading causes of the destruction of ecosystems and ,in turn, biodiversity. Here is a picture of an example of coal mining.

In the picture it is possible to see a small speck of grass in the mid-upper left of the picture. Just imagine that the picture used to be full of grass, trees, animals, and insects all living together in harmony. After all the coal has been extracted from the area, the coal miners rebuild the land to make it look as if nothing ever happened. Soil is brought in to fill in the huge holes, grass is put down, and trees are planted but, in the end, man-made nature is not sufficient to keep biodiversity alive.

Hello, my name is Rafael and I am an Exercise Science major. This is my blog page for Biology and Human Concerns and this is the first blog of the semester. There will be a total of ten blogs so stay tuned and subscribe. On the first day of class I did not know what to expect because I have never taken a biology course at Transy. I am interested with nature and how us, as humans, can help protect it. Over the summer I worked in landscaping so I dealt a lot with flowers and weeds. Since then I have come to admire and acknowledge flowers and beds when I see them because it requires a lot of hard work to maintain them.  Trees, grass, and nature, in general, require hard work to maintain because with all the land out there people will hire workers to destroy it so that they can build something. Destroying nature will have a huge affect on organisms who live in that ecosystem. Those organisms will not reproduce which in turn affects another organism and the effect will continue until organisms go extinct. These effects will hurt the ecosystem and potentially hurt humans in some sort of way because there are tons of animals or insects that are beneficial for humans. For instance, cows are very important for us because they provide meat and everyone loves a good steak, so if a cow ate something bad which caused it to become sick then its meat will become bad. If the meat somehow gets to the stores and someone eats it, well, he or she could potentially get sick. This could also happen with other animals such as chicken or pigs. Well, that is the end of the first blog. Hope you enjoyed it!