Essential Environment: The Science Behind the Stories, 5th Edition

Personalize Learning with MasteringEnvironmentalScience^®

• MasteringEnvironmentalScience is an online homework, tutorial, and assessment program designed to improve results by helping students quickly master concepts. Students benefit from self-paced tutorials that feature immediate wrong-answer feedback and hints that emulate the office-hour experience to keep them on track. With a wide range of interactive, engaging, and assignable activities, students are encouraged to actively learn and retain tough course concepts. Specific features include:
• NEW! Activities in MasteringEnvironmentalScience , include:
• Ten Process of Science coaching activities, created by coauthor Matt Laposata,help students think critically about the environmental research presented in the text’s Science Behind the Story essays. These activities help students engage in the scientific process by exploring basic experimental design and interpreting research data.
• Interpreting Graphs and Data Questions help students develop basic data analysis skills and practice applying these skills by interpreting data about environmental issues. Each of these questions is paired with the new in-text Data Analysis Questions.

• First Impressions quiz questions, created by coauthor Matt Laposata are available as assignable homework or through Learning Catalytics.  These engaging questions can facilitate class discussions, and help instructors assess student understanding of environmental issues and other concepts from the very first day of class.

• Video Field Trips give students fascinating behind-the-scenes tours of real environmental issues and the strategies and solutions employed to address them. These popular, short videos are included on the Instructor Resource DVD for classroom presentations and within MasteringEnvironmentalScience for automatically graded student assignments. These exclusive videos engage students as they explore:
• Coal-Fired Power Plant
• Waste Water Treatment Facility
• Sustainable Agriculture
• Landfill and Recycling Center
• Water Utility Facility
• Wind Power
• Campus Sustainability
• Invasive Species: Lionfish
• Solar Energy
• Electronic Waste
• Carbon Neutrality on Campus
• Prescribed Fires
• NEW! Water Desalination Plant
• NEW! Bee Colony Collapse Disorder

Help Students Understand and Analyze Data

• NEW! DataQ’s are Data Analysis Questions accompanying 2-3 selected figures in each chapter and challenge students to practice quantitative skills of interpretation and analysis.  Students can check their answers using the answer key at the end of the text, or complete a similar activity in MasteringEnvironmentalScience for credit.
• UPDATED! New Science behind the Story essays explore the scientific process and how we know what we know. New research topics include Did Soap Operas Reduce Fertility in Brazil (Chapter 6), How Productive is Organic Farming (Chapter 7), and Comparing Energy Sources (Chapter 16).
• Unique Calculating Ecological Footprint activities build basic data and graph reading skills for math-phobic students. These end of chapter exercises challenge students to quantify the environmental impacts of their own actions, and then scale these impacts up to the societal level. The book’s extensive Graphing Appendix and assignable GraphIt! activities in MasteringEnvironmentalScience provide additional instruction to build basic data and graph-reading skills. 
• Emphasis is placed on current data and citing sources to encourage students and instructors to reference the primary data source of information presented.

Improve Science Literacy

• NEW! Ten Process of Science coaching activities, created by coauthor Matt Laposata,help students think critically about the environmental research presented in the text’s Science Behind the Story essays. These activities help students engage in the scientific process by exploring basic experimental design and interpreting research data.,
• Expanded FAQs highlight common misconceptions students often hold about environmental issues. Integrated throughout each chapter, FAQ’s capture the teaching moment for addressing these widely-held student misconceptions.
• NEW! Learning Catalytics Misconception Questions can be used during class to spark discussion and reveal common misconceptions about environmental research and issues.  A selection of new testbank questions relate back to the Learning Catalytics questions for assessment and reinforcement.
• Emphasis is placed on developing students’ critical thinking skills. Weighing the Issues questions throughout each chapter encourage students to grapple with ethical questions and apply what they have learned. Seeking Solutions questions at the end of each chapter challenge students to consider ways to resolve environmental problems.

Keep Your Course Current and Relevant

• NEW! More than 30% of the central Case Studies are new to the Fifth Edition, including current, high-interest topics such as: 
• Saving Hawaii’s Native Forest Birds (Chapter 3)
• Costa Rica Values its Ecosystem Services (Chapter 5)
• Farm to Table –and Back Again—The Commons at Kennesaw State University (Chapter 7)
• Will We Slice Through the Serengeti? (Chapter 8)
• Clearing the Air in Los Angeles and Mexico City (Chapter 13)
• Hydrofracking the Marcellus Shale (Chapter 15)

·  NEW! Accuracy and Currency:Data updates have been made throughout all chapters. Examples include:

o   UPDATED! Climate change coverage in Chapter 14 has been thoroughly overhauled with a wealth of new and updated information and perspectives, including discussions on  threats from sea-level rise on the U.S. East Coast, and extreme weather events that correlate with climate change data.

o   NEW! Coverage of energy use in Chapters 14 and 15 has been thoroughly updated to reflect the rapid transitions and new patterns in energy use in the US and globally. Topics include how renewable energy sources continue to grow and become more mainstream, how the reach for fossil fuels has been extended through hydraulic fracturing for shale gas and shale oil, tar sands extraction, Arctic drilling, and deep-sea drilling.

o   NEW! Updated and expanded coverage of the emerging research surrounding bisphenol A and other endocrine-disrupting chemicals.

o   NEW! Key updates have been made about China's one-child policy and its demographic implications, as well as air pollution (Chapter 6 and Chapter 13).

o   NEW! Biodiversity chapter has been reframed to emphasize WHY students should care about biodiversity loss (Chapter 8).

o   NEW! Coverage of sustainable development is now integrated into the heavily revised economics and policy chapter, where it ties in well with the new case study and enhanced attention to valuation of ecosystem services (Chapter 5).

o   NEW! Campus sustainability efforts are previewed and introduced in Chapter 1 to provide an organizing theme for the Environmental Science course.

• Learning Objectives at the beginning of each chapter in the text define what students should be able to do after completing the chapter. MasteringEnvironmentalScience also links assessments to learning objectives so you can track students’ progress.
• Printed on FSC-certified paper to set the gold standard for environmentally responsible publishing, following guidelines from the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) for reducing our impact on forests.