Add a Hardscape Ground Cover. Many attractive possibilities exist, from elegant lattice screens to rustic do-it-yourself structures. The columnar shape of the juniper and height also helps to cover up the ugly electrical box. How to Hide Common (But Ugly) Outdoor Items. All of this, however, is assuming it can move. Easy Meter Reading with Vintage Look. Just make sure the support posts are not intrusive to any underground wire or cabling and everything is still accessible by utility workers. Many people hide them by planting shrubs and other plants around them, but you could easily make a slipcover with beadboard and top it with a birdhouse. Before planning your plantings, here are a few things to remember: -. Easy to move or take down for the winter or whenever you need to access the utility boxes. You should refer to the plant hardiness zone map by the United States Government's Department of Agriculture (USDA) to choose the plants most likely to thrive in your location. If you can safely plant around the utility box, consider putting in a row of tall shrubs or small trees. The clearance is necessary in order for the utility workers to access the box from a safe distance. Using Freestanding Yard Privacy Screens.
If you have an eyesore like an electrical box attached to your home, don't worry. You do not have to do anything except slide this out to access the HVAC compartment machine. How to Hide Undesirable Utility Equipment With Landscape Design. That being said, there are ways to hide utility boxes that don't conflict with any restrictions. You can easily turn around this mismatch by painting the box the same color as the wall.
There are many creative ways to disguise utility boxes while keeping them accessible. To hide the ugly electric box, you may build a wooden barrier around it. You are sure to find an easy solution that works for your needs. How can I disguise my electric box in my yard? If you want a more functional hiding place for the electric box, you can create a multi-tiered outdoor cabinet. This mahogany shed, which is about six feet high and three feet deep, would take hours to build. Use Foundation Plantings. For some it's a downspout, air conditioning unit, or barbecue. Add planter boxes to the base of free-standing privacy screens, fences or lattice panels to support climbers, keeping with the yard's theme. Cheap Versions Of These Ideas That Are More "Temporary" Around Your Utility Box. Planting options include purple hopseed bush (Dodonaea viscosa 'Purpurea'), fern podocarpus (Podocarpus gracilior) or 'Spartan' Chinese juniper (Juniperus chinensis 'Spartan'). A fence panel can also make an attractive screening solution if your propane tank is near the house or a fence. You should still avoid planting these above underground wiring – not just for safety, but because they may need to be accessed at some point.
They will eventually fill in and provide a natural cover up to the trash cans and garden tools. We can come to your space and discuss all your planting options from shrubs, trees, perennials, grasses, hedges, and more. Two tile pavers were removed, and the space was lined with wood. If you surround the box completely with fencing, be sure to add an outward-swinging gate to keep the box accessible. It should be at least 3 feet tall to block the box. These will grow thick and lush, easily blocking out the ugly metal. Air conditioning is great during those steamy summer months. Learn more about gardens we've designed here or contact us for a consultation about how we can bring your dream landscape to life. Use lightweight potting mix and place the containers on casters, if possible, to make moving them easier. Maybe your garage is packed with other items and you don't want to store your garbage bins inside, so you keep them outside.
Depending on how they're made, they may not suit your needs. We're talking about picking privacy plants to hide AC unit, pool filters, plumbing, electrical equipment, etc. It is up to you to familiarize yourself with these restrictions. They also take the same gorgeous climbing plants, just with a different style of backdrop. Many people are discovering new landscaping ideas to hide utility boxes. You can also conceal your meter box easily using paint. Screen The Utility Box With A Trellis, Screen Or Fence. Accessories such as potted plants, gates, and wheeled displays are as beautiful as they are easy to move. A neat, slatted screen comes together quickly with a brad nailer, plywood, and 2x4 boards—and even features the home's address number as well. And you happen to be the kind neighbor who has to "house" this unsightly beast on your property.
How close can you plant to an electrical box? There's no escaping things like garbage bins and an unsightly utility box. Ways to Hide Outdoor Eyesores. Sophisticated Cedar Fence. Organize Garden Tools. They are nice to look at, pretty easy to assemble, and provide plenty of airflow. You have beautifully landscaped your house, carefully designing and implementing the garden of your dreams. Even bikes can hide back there.
From a corner fence to a wooden barrier, carefully placed potted plants, or prickly shrubs, the first thing you need to do is plan out your project. If there are no guidelines on the box itself, check with your utility company before adding any elements around the utility box. Effective ornamental grass, like fountain grass, is a hardy, perennial, mound-forming grass with a fountain-like appearance and minimal maintenance. Understanding Your Limitations. Fairy fuchsia (Fuchsia thymifolia), 'Morning Light' maiden grass (Miscanthus sinensis 'Morning Light'), and 'Lemon Beauty' box honeysuckle (Lonicera nitida 'Lemon Beauty') are all effective choices. Ideal for hiding unwanted objects cluttering your yard like pipes.
This policy applies to anyone that uses our Services, regardless of their location. Get a number of pipes that are cut to the same size and shape, and place them equidistant to each other and around the electrical box. 51+ Front Landscaping Garden Ideas. The only plausible option you are left with if you want to maintain your aesthetic ambiance is to hide the transformer box in your yard. These boxes are serious business, and there are often restrictions about what you can do near them, like bans on permanent structures and distances before you can plant anything. If the box is near the home's corners, you can use tall vases or pots to keep it concealed in a manner that is like how hedging would have concealed it. Ornamental grasses are one of the best at that because they grow tall enough in a single season to hide boxes, then can be left standing most of the winter.
Lay one on its side on the ground in your yard to measure the width and height. The third side is left open to remove the container easily. Outdoor screens, like the resin wicker design shown below, can also help to cut down on noise as well, which is ideal when an outdoor entertaining space is located near the unit. Take the basics of building a planter, close in the bottom, and add a door. Plant a fast-growing, flowering, vine-like clematis or trumpet vine to fill in the space and distract the eye. Finely-textured plants like mint bush make an effective screen for unsightly elements.
To make it more appealing, you can use shorter grass around the box and also put several flower vases on top of the box. In situations where storing garbage cans and recycling bins inside a garage isn't an option, don't worry we've got you covered. Flower Box Surprise. Check out a rendering of a possible solution submitted by A Inc. Start by focusing on the positive.
Be sure to check any potential plantings – trees or otherwise – with a local expert to find something suitable. Just make sure that you are following the right measurements to ensure safety. Any type of ornamental grass does a great job at hiding an electrical box. They litter the area and reduce the coziness of the landscape you are building. Water hoses and trash cans are two such examples.
A potting bench creates a purposeful outdoor work space for gardening and also provides great storage options for extra soil, small gardening tools, extra pots, and even fire wood. An angled wood fence can do more than just boxing an electric box. Their root systems can potentially damage underground wiring and cables. Here's another lattice screen built to hide an AC unit, but this is an even easier DIY. First, consider whether you'd rather hide your existing downspouts or just replace them. These nicely shaped shrubs grow up to 4 feet tall and are great to plant near a fence to disguise electrical equipment or a pool pump. Plant pretty flowers and plants in the lid and no one will ever know you're hiding a water hose or two inside.
Here we discuss student responses to pre/post multiple-choice questions, exam questions, and a student attitudinal survey. Proportion of population members at specific age ranges. Unchecked human population growth could have dire long-term effects on our environment.
Biotechnology has applications in such areas as agriculture, pharmaceuticals, food and beverages, medicine, energy, the environment, and genetic engineering. ADDITIONAL SUGGESTIONS TO ENHANCE STUDENT LEARNING WHILE USING THIS LESSON. Efforts to control population growth led to the one-child policy in China, which used to include more severe consequences, but now imposes fines on urban couples who have more than one child. POPULATION GROWTH LESSON. I love this video clip from NPR because the visual makes human population growth so easy to see. Students now investigate why the equation is (1-N/K) and how the new variable (K) can result in a decreasing growth rate. Resources are: - FACE TO FACE READY- Word Document/PDF/PowerPoint- printable resources for delivery in the classroom. Small world: crafting an inclusive classroom (no matter what you teach). I believe humans back then were more prone to diseases and were not able to stay alive nor reproduce as much, therefore they were slower at reproducing. Make sure all computers have the Avida-ED program loaded onto them. Carefully study the population chart above and answer two of the following questions: 1. After the revote, the instructor asked for students to volunteer their thinking ("share") and then discussed the correct answer and student thinking. Topics Covered: Line graphs, Bar graphs, Pie graphs, Human population growth, Global carbon dioxide emissions, Global temperatures changes, Gre. Age structure allows better prediction of population growth, plus the ability to associate this growth with the level of economic development in the region.
In the instructor slides and student worksheet, each classroom-discussion open-response TPS question opportunity is identified by "TPSQ" and each clicker question TPS opportunity is abbreviated "CQ" (Supporting File S1: Lesson Presentation Slides with Instructor Notes, and Supporting File S6: Student Worksheet). 15 shows that 123 years were necessary to add 1 billion humans in 1930, but it only took 24 years to add two billion people between 1975 and 1999. Others may run the program with the appropriate dish size and directly observe when it reaches the given population. What's included: • A word document worksheet that includes activities that introduce key terminology, helps students to read graphs, describe distributions and complete structured reading activities. We can measure the human population's growth rate using a simple mathematical equation, where the current population size is subtracted from the beginning population size and then divided by the beginning size (Figure 2). For example, throughout the lesson more than 25% of the codes were "students talking to the class" (asking and answering questions) and more than 25% of the codes were "students working" (working individually, answering clicker questions, and working in groups).
Population (in billions). In our class, 70% of students answered correctly before peer discussion (answer C) and 93% were correct following peer discussion (Supporting File S3: Clicker Questions and Student Responses). Ask them to predict when a population will reach a given number in a certain sized environment. At this point, no more room is available for new organisms; new organisms replace old organisms, resulting in no net population growth. The instructor (author KP) who taught this lesson was observed using the Classroom Observation Protocol for Undergraduate STEM (COPUS) (21). I give the students a quiz on reading age structure curves prior to starting the activity. It is possible that modern humans were pushed to near extinction during prehistory. Humans can construct shelter to protect them from the elements and have developed agriculture and domesticated animals to increase their food supplies. Want to join the conversation?
The most common incorrect answer for PPTQ5 is that growth rate increases over time in a logistic model (incorrect answer A), where students likely equated a larger population size with a faster growth rate. The earliest population estimates for modern humans, at the time of speciation approximately 200, 000 years ago, range from 100, 000 to 300, 000 people. The instructor describes modeling and then explains that although ecologists in general seek to understand how all organisms in an ecosystem interact, population ecologists approach this goal by focusing on individual populations that they can observe and manipulate with experiments (Supporting File S1: Lesson Presentation Slides with Instructor Notes, slide 3). The human population is currently experiencing exponential growth even though human reproduction is far below its biotic potential (Figure 45. Begin by making r=1. The sliders allow changes to be made to the population model. Then ask if the environment were bigger or smaller, what affect that would have on their predictions.
How does population size respond to changes in this parameter? If so, you should post it there, too. This also increases the risk of disease spread, which is particularly worrisome in DRC and Nigeria, where Ebola is present. Create the most beautiful study materials using our templates. NEA Thought & Action Fall:51-61. 4: Explain why ecosystems can be relatively stable over hundreds or thousands of years, even though populations may fluctuate. As they come into contact with each other, they mix the liquids in their vials. Students were assessed using formative and summative questions aligned with the learning outcomes: quantifying population size, plotting and predicting population growth, calculating growth rate, and incorporating carrying capacity in logistic growth curves. As you can see, in 2100 India will have significantly exceeded China to become the world's single largest population, while China is projected to actually decrease its population by nearly 400 million. I use this cartoon as an introduction and have students read it for bell work before we take notes on logistic and exponential growth, and carrying capacity. Answer the following IB style questions about population growth curves.
Alignment agreement: Thanks for your feedback! The United Nations estimates that future world population growth may vary from 6 billion (a decrease) to 16 billion people by the year 2100. For full page, click here. Do we have an obligation to try and save endangered species? The reasons for this massive increase in Africa are complex and numerous, including reduced infant mortality rates, increased birth rates, limited access to contraceptives, and younger age of motherhood. University of Maine, University of Calgary.
It is a good idea to have back-up data to provide students that struggle with this lab. Apply mathematical routines to quantities that describe communities composed of populations of organisms that interact in complex ways. Two pre/post-test questions (PPTQ4 and PPTQ5) asked students to determine how growth rate changes over time in exponential and logistic growth curves (Table 2, Supporting File S4: Pre/Post-Test Questions and Student Responses). This is true for all animal species, human and non-human alike. Graphing Deer Populations Worksheet Free Lesson Plan. The actual growth rates in different countries are shown in Figure \(\PageIndex{4}\), with the highest rates tending to be in the less economically developed countries of Africa and Asia. Create flashcards in notes completely automatically. For approximately four minutes, students brainstorm in small groups and write (on their worksheet) the factors that they think might affect barnacle population size (Supporting File S1: Lesson Presentation Slides with Instructor Notes, slide 4). Some evidence suggests that modern humans may have been reduced to a population of less than 10, 000 individuals globally around 70, 000 years ago, following the catastrophic eruption of a supervolcano at what is currently Lake Toba in the Indonesian province of North Sumatra. To conclude, students are given the opportunity to synthesize the concepts covered throughout the lesson. We therefore recommend emphasizing slope and additional opportunities for students to practice and complete problems where they estimate or calculate the slope in the context of population growth models. Interpret the slope (rate of change) and the intercept (constant term) of a linear model in the context of the data. Note any changes in scaling of the y axis.
The slide includes a diagram of the experimental set up to illustrate that the number of barnacles increases over time. Introductory biology students answered ten pre/post multiple-choice questions (abbreviated PPTQ for Pre/Post Test Questions). In Avida-ED, the "dish size" is the absolute highest number of possible organisms and cannot be exceeded. A common error in making the graph is students do not space units properly on the axes. Students will model biotic and abiotic factors and how those factors affect population size. Using a line graph to describe the changes to the global population from 1750-2100 (est. Activity 1 - Modelling population growth. 2% annually during the early 1960s to around 1. Teacher note: Growth begins relatively slowly because fewer organisms are present to reproduce. Troubleshooting Tips. Population ecology is a topic well suited for the development of quantitative reasoning and literacy skills.
Identify your study strength and weaknesses. Explore moving all 3 of the population parameters. Student responses are included in the lesson plan and in Supporting File 3: Clicker Questions and Student Responses. Student responses to in-class questions are provided in the Progressing Through the Activity Section. The instructor can then request that students notice that the second part of the equation including K is (1-N/K). The instructor can encourage students to discuss their reasoning and what they think may influence the type of growth shown in the curve they selected. The Malthusian Theory has been criticized as it did not take into account the technological advances in agriculture that helped to increase the supply of food and other resources beyond natural limits. To finish off, let's look at an example of a worksheet involving population growth. The contents of this digital library curriculum were developed through the Bio-Inspired Technology and Systems (BITS) research experience for teachers program under National Science Foundation RET grant no.
Some may use a mathematical equation. For a function that models a relationship between two quantities, interpret key features of graphs and tables in terms of the quantities, and sketch graphs showing key features given a verbal description of the relationship. 100, 000-300, 000 people. Set individual study goals and earn points reaching them.