After visiting the National Geographic magazine feature Africa MegaFlyover and reading the National Geographic News article about Michael Fay, Africa Explorer Takes Off on Yearlong Aerial Survey, students will analyze several maps of Africa to see where the greatest levels of human impact can be observed. They will look at photographs from different parts of Africa showing both its human and natural landscapes, and will consider what these images might look like from the air. Students will conclude by writing letters pretending they are traveling on the MegaFlyover project and predicting the human impacts they will observe.

Geography

Standard 1: "How to use maps and other geographic representations, tools, and technologies to acquire, process, and report information from a spatial perspective"
Standard 4: "The physical and human characteristics of places"
Standard 12: "The processes, patterns, and functions of human settlement"
Standard 18: "How to apply geography to interpret the present and plan for the future"

Two to three hours

• Computer with Internet access

Students will

• analyze aerial photographs to see how they represent human activities;
• read and discuss an article about the MegaFlyover project;
• examine and discuss human impact maps of Africa;
• view pictures and take notes on Africa's human and natural landscapes; and
• write letters pretending they are traveling on the MegaFlyover project and predicting the effects of the human impacts they observe.

Ask students who have traveled in airplanes to describe what the land looks like from above. What types of things do they remember seeing? What types of natural and human-made scenes can they recall?

Have students spend a couple minutes looking at the aerial photographs on these pages:

Aerial Photographs
Aerials Only Gallery (scroll down to the bottom and choose a location)

As they look at the pictures, ask students to identify as many human-made structures as they can.

Have students visit the National Geographic magazine feature MegaFlyover for some background on the MegaFlyover project. Then, have students read National Geographic News's Africa Explorer Takes Off on Yearlong Aerial Survey, as well as the Environmental News Network's Africa MegaFlyover: Michael Fay and the Human Footprint, and ask them to summarize the main ideas of the articles in a class discussion. Students should understand the following points:

• Fay plans to study and photograph evidence of human impact on Africa's wilderness from the air.
• Fay will look for roads, trails, huts, and other human-made things. He'll also try to see what shape the wildlife and vegetation are in (e.g., how many animals he can spot or whether the plants look healthy) to determine the extent to which human activities have been harmful to animals and plants.
• Fay is trying to find some of the places that can most likely be conserved as natural areas.

Have students go to the MegaFlyover page and click on "See the complete HF map" in small letters above the map of Africa. (A new window will open up on their screens, showing the Human Footprint map of Africa.)

Explain that the colors on this map represent the level of human impact on the African continent. Red and dark orange represent areas of high impact, such as cities, while green areas have the lowest levels of impact. The really big green area in the north is the Sahara Desert.

Ask students what they think is meant by "human impact." What types of things might they expect to find in the red and dark orange areas? What about in the green areas? They should realize that they'd find more buildings, roads, and other human-made structures in the red and dark orange areas.

Have students click on Map Data Layers in the upper right of this window. Ask them to click on "The Human Footprint" to deselect this layer. Then have them click on "Access" and then "Map Data Layers" again to close that menu.

Students will now see a map illustrating the level of access that people have to roads, railroads, and rivers. Discuss what the map shows. In which parts of Africa do people have the most access to transportation routes, and in which areas do they have the least access? Does this map make Africa look like a "wilderness," or does it look densely populated?

Have students again click on Map Data Layers in the upper right. Ask them to click on "Access" to deselect this layer, and then have them click on "Population" and then "Map Data Layers" again to close that menu.

They're now looking at a representation of population density in Africa. Explain that a darker color means there is a greater number of people living in a given area. What does this map reveal about the amount of human activity in different parts of Africa?

Have students go to Africa Focus and select "Search Atlas." They'll be taken to a page with a map of Africa and its countries.

Have students click on Tanzania (East Africa), Gabon (West Africa), Namibia (southern Africa), and Algeria (North Africa) and look at pictures from these countries. If time is limited and technology allows, show the pictures to the entire class with a projector. If you have more time, have students look at pictures from other countries as well as the ones above.

For each country, ask students to take notes to answer these two questions:

• What does the natural landscape look like?
• What does the human landscape look like? What human-made objects and structures do you notice?

Ask students to hypothesize the natural and human-made things Michael Fay might see from the air. Point out that the Cessna Fay will be traveling in generally flies much lower than the commercial jet planes students may be accustomed to taking.

Ask students to pretend they're traveling with Michael Fay. Have them write letters to their families or to the newspaper predicting the following aspects of the trip:

• Where they'll see the most signs of human activity (they might want to return to the Human Footprint map to figure this out).
• What types of human activity they're likely to observe.
• How these observations will help Fay determine where African countries should focus their conservation efforts.

• Have students draw pictures showing both the human-made and natural things they might see from the plane in various parts of Africa.
  
  
• Have students return to the Human Footprint map, click on "Map Data Layers," and click "The Human Footprint" to deselect that layer. Have them select both "Protected Areas" and "Protected Area Points" from the list of map layers and then click "Map Data Layers" again to close the menu. They will see red shaded areas that represent Africa's national parks and other protected areas. They can move the mouse over the yellow dots to see a popup stating the type of protected area each indicates (e.g., national park or game reserve).
  
  Discuss the locations of protected areas; which parts of Africa have the most protected land? Also discuss the size of the protected areas; which parts of Africa have the largest protected areas? What are some advantages of large versus small or fragmented protected areas?

Africa Focus
National Geographic Magazine: Africa MegaFlyover—Charting the Last Wild Places on Earth
National Geographic News: Africa Explorer Takes Off on Yearlong Aerial Survey
Wildlife Conservation Society