I worked on exercises 2a and 2b in our lab on wednesday, and spent a bit more time at home finishing up 2b. The exercises showed a good handful of tools to utilize within the system, from how to change and utilize details in different layers, to tracking population sizes, and how to access pre-recorded data that is stored within the system.

I think this type of global mapping for populations and levels of pollution can be beneficial for tracking widescale environmental factors. Tracking pollution is a very useful tool to ensure the health of human populations, but I think it can also be used to track environmental pollution, such as light pollution, which can have major negative impacts for natural ecosystems but that which impacts humans very little in the grand scheme. As for tracking populations, I think it'd be interesting to see a global illustration of the spread of invasive species across the continents, just to see what the entire scale is of the changes being seen as a result of accidental organism introduction to foreign countries.

PS. I marked the location as Havana, Cuba, simply because the project was insisting I have a valid location and would not accept globe or earth as options.