This website provides, in full, a chapter excerpted from the book entitled “Ecosystem Management: Applications for Sustainable Forest and Wildlife Resources” edited by M.S. Boyce and A. Haney, 1997. The hierarchical framework is a regionalization classification and mapping system for stratifying the Earth into progressively smaller areas of increasingly uniform ecological potentials. Ecological types are classified and ecological units are mapped based on associations of those biotic and environmental factors.
This activity was designed to give students an opportunity to realize that all rocks weather mechanically and each specific rock type has its own particular rate of weathering. Students discover that mechanical weathering is the process of breaking down bedrock into smaller fragments by physical as opposed to chemical means and that rock weathering, although it seems to occur slowly in human terms, is an extremely significant part of the rock cycle.
