engleski

ENVIRONMENTAL ALTERATIONS AND SENSORY LANDSCAPE

Climate change and pollution impart severe pressures on the natural world and humans. Humans make attempts to adapt, mainly through devising and applying technological solutions. However, when we come to senses which incorporate the environment into the body, there is a mismatch between the way senses evolved and present surroundings, causing the disruption of senses, such as visual acuity, smell, taste, and hearing. The disruptions to sensory landscape have thus altered the relationships between the organisms and the environment, whereby the perceptual world or 'umwelt' for each organism differs. The impacts of environmental alterations to sensory landscape disrupt human sensory functioning, resulting in health impacts. Habitat disturbance in aquatic environments caused by acidification, contaminants, noise, optical degradation, elevated temperature, and electromagnetic fields can severely impact animal sensory biology. The islands, surrounded by water and still having a predominantly preserved natural habitats, have a special role for studying and understanding sensory system responses of both humans and wildlife to environmental change.Best practice involves Lastovo, a remote island and protected area where local anthropogenically-induced changes are not yet dominant which already serves as a reference locality for night visual scape due to absence of light pollution. Its preservation is important for other sensescapes as well.

sensory landscape, senses, climate change, pollution, Lastovo

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