bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Virtual Geographic Environments
Authors: Chen Min , Lin Hui , Lu Guonian
Published: March 2017

The geographic environment in which we live is a comprehensive and dynamic system. Geo‐featured processes and phenomena are very complex and challenge the usability of traditional geographic analysis and experimental tools. Virtual worlds have a potential for scientific research in many fields. Virtual geographic environments (VGEs), which is characterized by support for geographic data management (geodata management), geographic simulation (geosimulation), geographic interaction (geointeraction), and geographic collaboration (geocollaboration), play an important role in geographic research. The evolution of VGEs is reviewed according to the various stages of their development, and the framework and components are introduced. The contributions of VGEs that have been and are expected to be achieved are illustrated based on former discussions of geographic questions, geographic knowledge, and the future trend of geographic research. Future studies that may develop and promote a more practical VGE are suggested.
Visualization
Authors: Robinson Anthony C.
Published: March 2017

The 1980s saw the rise of research focused on translating digital data sources from their original tabular formats into visual representations that could prompt thinking and help users make new discoveries. This work, known broadly as visualization, was quickly adopted by geographers who shifted focus toward geographic datasets and the challenges posed by representing spatiotemporal phenomena. Geographic visualization grew from this work with the development of interactive mapping tools that combined statistical graphics with maps to support exploration and analysis. In recent years, geovisual analytics has become an emerging area of interest as the next evolutionary step in geographic visualization, with a focus on visual and computational methods for supporting analytical reasoning about geospatial information.
Geodesy
Authors: Clarke Keith C.
Published: March 2017

Geodesy is the field of knowledge that studies the size and shape of the Earth and its gravitational field, and their changes over time. Increasingly accurate estimates of Earth's size, shape, and gravity field have followed a varied path during the 2000‐year history of their measurement. The geodetic framework forms the basis for cartography, mapping and charting, but is also essential for numerous scientific, engineering, and navigational applications. Geography, geographic information science, and now location‐based services have inherited the various ellipsoids, datums, geoids, and deflections of the vertical measured and explained by geodesy. These disciplines are profoundly influenced not just by their history, but also by geodesy's move toward quantifying the dynamics of the figure of the Earth.
Cultural Capital
Authors: Johnson Louise C.
Published: March 2017

Founded on the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, the concept of cultural capital has been used directly and indirectly by geographers to analyze existing phenomena such as gentrification; to understand emerging economic sectors such as the cultural or creative industries; and to form the basis of new policy agendas for urban, regional, and social regeneration. In this exercise, they have used the concepts developed by Bourdieu and modified them in the light of contemporary economies or their analytical purpose.
Psychoanalysis/Psychoanalytic Geography
Authors: Stepney Melissa
Published: March 2017

Psychoanalysis is both a science and a profession emanating from the works of Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). Freud developed a new system of psychology called psychoanalysis, which encompasses a form of inquiry about society, a therapeutic practice, and a theory of personality. Freud's ideas, which developed throughout his lifetime, have been hugely influential on modern thought and on the ways in which we understand contemporary society, our relationships with each other, and human mental functioning. As human geographers are concerned with people's relationships with one another
spatially
, a subdiscipline called psychoanalytic geography emerged during the late 1990s. Since then, human geographers have drawn on psychoanalytic theories and methods to understand a variety of real‐world problems and issues. While engagement with psychoanalysis in geography has been met with some ambivalence, a recent renewed interest has showcased the innovative and cutting edge possibilities for psychoanalytic geography.
Rural/Urban Divide
Authors: Gough Katherine V.
Published: March 2017

The “rural/urban divide” is rather a misnomer, as there are many similarities in the nature of the activities that take place in rural and urban places, as well as numerous linkages at a range of scales that bind the two together. This has important consequences not only for research but also for policymakers, especially in a Global South context.
Anarchist Geography
Authors: Springer Simon
Published: March 2017

Anarchism is a perennially misunderstood idea. Far from representing violence and chaos, anarchism is a form of praxis centered on nonhierarchical organization and the practice of mutual aid, implemented through the everyday politics of direct action, voluntary association, and self‐management. Although they are often misrepresented as an ideology solely concerned with the destruction of the state, the power of anarchist geographies resides in their integrality, which refuses to assign priority to any one of the multiple dominating apparatuses that constrain our lives, as all are seen as irreducible to one another. Anarchism is the struggle against
all
forms of oppression and exploitation, a protean and multivariate process that is decidedly geographical.
Decision Analysis
Authors: Chan Yupo
Published: March 2017

This entry reviews how decision analysis contributes to the field of GIScience and technology. It focuses in particular on multicriteria decision‐making and offers a case study of airport location to illustrate how this approach captures the complex negotiation between airport authorities and the public in siting a new airport. Importantly, decision analysis can offer implicit representation of a multi‐attribute utility function without an explicit mathematical expression. Instead, the value of the airport is captured in a site‐specific setting, where the interests of the stakeholders are revealed through a town hall meeting. The process converges toward an agreed‐upon airport site. Going beyond the immediate case study, a broader look at the insightful role of decision analysis in viewing classic facility location problems is discussed, including medians and centers. The entry ends with a projection of where the art and science of decision analysis are heading in the future.
Optical Remote Sensing
Authors: Shao Guofan
Published: March 2017

Optical remote sensing (ORS) is a traditional remote sensing method. Contemporary ORS data are largely in digital formats and may consist of visible, near‐infrared, and shortwave infrared bands. ORS data can be characterized with radiometric, spatial, spectral, and temporal resolutions. Both airborne and spaceborne ORS systems are available for a variety of purposes. The presentations of ORS have been advanced from single‐color dots or symbols into visual‐reality images, which can be enhanced with band selection and transformation techniques. Both commercial and free computer programs are available for ORS data analysis. Valuable information can be obtained by using supervised and unsupervised information extraction methods. There are day‐to‐day and specialized applications with ORS data. Correctly using ORS data is critical to realize their effectiveness, usefulness, and powerfulness.
Environmental Policy
Authors: Palmer James R.
Published: March 2017

Environmental policy may refer to any consciously planned human activity that is designed to alter the conditions under which natural (or, increasingly, nonhuman) landscapes, systems, and processes exist and operate. It is often but not always intended to reduce the impacts of ostensibly deleterious human activity upon nonhuman forms of existence. In the twenty‐first century, environmental policy assumes a wide diversity of forms, and is undertaken not only by state governments, but also increasingly by a range of nonstate actors as well, including local communities, civil society organizations, and supranational bodies of various kinds. Geographical work on environmental policy, whilst sometimes “applied,” has more often taken a critical approach to the complex processes by which knowledge is produced, policy objectives are formulated, and desirable environmental futures are identified in this field.
Growth Poles and Growth Centers
Authors: Wang Jici , Li Peng‐Fei
Published: March 2017

Economic development is always an uneven spatial process. However, economic theories used to neglect geographical concentration of activities and explain development in an abstract and ideal world. In the 1950s, François Perroux and his disciples developed a concept of unbalanced economic development: growth poles (pôles de croissance). Although originally growth poles were not defined in geographical settings, the idea was soon developed and modified as a theory and strategy of regional development, and widely adopted in policy arenas throughout the world in the 1960s and 1970s. In transforming from a theoretical idea to a practical instrument and gaining public popularity, growth poles lost their original meaning and intellectual rigor. In the 1980s, most growth pole projects were abandoned for failing to achieve their initial goals, although some policy targets had unrealistic expectations.
Industrial Restructuring
Authors: Yang Chun
Published: March 2017

Industrial restructuring refers to structural changes of territorial economies from the manufacturing to services sector at a range of spatial scales involving national, regional or city levels. Along with the increasing global shifts of industrial activities, industrial restructuring has evolved over time and across space from North America and Western Europe in the 1960s to Japan and, later on, to the first generation of newly industrializing economies (NIEs) in Asia in the 1970s and to China since 2000. The consequences of industrial restructuring cover demographic and employment change, deindustrialization, development of producer services, and spatial shifts of urban and regional economies. Notably, in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis and economic recession, industrial restructuring has demonstrated some new tendencies, such as an upsurge of manufacturing employment through nearshoring of manufacturing to home markets in the Western advanced economies, for example, the United States.
Digital Earth
Authors: Wang Changlin
Published: March 2017

The Digital Earth concept, first envisioned in 1992 and then popularized in 1998 by former US Vice President Al Gore, is now well established and widely recognized internationally, especially through a series of international symposia on Digital Earth, Digital Earth Summits, the International Society for Digital Earth, and the
International Journal of Digital Earth
. This entry introduces the Digital Earth vision and describes its coevolution with advances in technology. It covers a series of initiatives, components, platforms, and virtual globes of various kinds and describes their relations to Digital Earth. The entry also gives a brief introduction to the next generation of Digital Earth and proposed guidelines for its future development.
Periglacial Processes and Landforms
Authors: Wilkerson Forrest D. , Schmid Ginger L.
Published: March 2017

Periglacial processes and landforms are created in cold, dry environments in a variety of high latitude and high altitude locations. Climate conditions include cold winters, relatively warm summers that allow for numerous freeze‐thaw cycles, and enough precipitation to allow ground ice to develop, but not so much that glaciers are created. Processes that lead to landform development are complex, polygenetic, and involve a variety of characteristics that can be highly variable even within landforms found in a single location. Landform creation and the sorting process are primarily driven by the freezing process and the expansion of water as it transitions to ice. During periods of thaw, the landforms do not return to their original position, which allows the next round of freezing to enhance the formation and continued growth of the landforms. Periglacial landforms are susceptible to climate warming, which should reduce rates of activity and landform development.
Data Model,
F
‐Objects and
O
‐Fields
Authors: Cova Thomas J.
Published: March 2017

Data models describe how reality is to be represented in a database. Geographic data models are data models that incorporate an explicit representation of geographic phenomena. Two conceptual perspectives used in geographic data modeling involve viewing geographic reality as comprising continuous fields or discrete geographic objects, otherwise known as the field/object dichotomy. While this dichotomy has been valuable in advancing geographic information research and pedagogy, the quest for hybrid views has intrigued researchers for decades. Two example hybrids are objects with internal field variation (field‐objects or F‐objects) and fields where every location is mapped to one or more spatial objects (object‐fields or O‐fields). This entry reviews geographic data modeling, the field/object dichotomy, proposed hybrids, hybrids in the context of geographic dynamics, and areas for further research.
Cultural Heritage
Authors: Chang T.C.
Published: March 2017

Heritage refers to anything of value inherited from the past, and comprises both natural and cultural resources. Geographers have explored heritage by looking at their location, distribution, and scale. Different subdisciplines including cultural, economic, historical, tourism, and urban geography have also focused on issues such as heritage planning, the effects of tourism, identity and representation, and the regeneration of historic cities and towns. Geographers have also studied the emergence of the heritage industry and the processes and effects of commodification. As heritage is packaged into a commercial product to be marketed and sold, questions concerning authenticity have been raised and discussed. Beyond the field of tourism, heritage is regarded as an important dimension in nation building and in the identity formation of people and places. The entry concludes by looking at the future of heritage and how it can be sensitively and sustainably managed.
Finance and Development
Authors: Dixon Adam D.
Published: March 2017

Finance and the financial system are key components in the workings of a capitalist market economy and of capitalist firms. The absence of finance or an inefficient financial system may be detrimental to economic growth and development, which is often the case for poor and developing regions. This entry reviews in the first instance debates over the direction of causality of finance in driving economic growth and development. It then considers global financial integration, including special topics such as Islamic finance and the rise of sovereign wealth funds. The entry concludes with a discussion of financial exclusion and microfinance.
Location‐Allocation Analysis
Authors: Tanaka Ken‐ichi , Furuta Takehiro
Published: March 2017

Location‐allocation analysis is a process that develops mathematical location models, devises solution algorithms, and applies these methods to real‐world decision‐making situations that involve placement of facilities in a given space. Examples of facilities include schools, libraries, ambulance stations, factories, retail outlets, and hydrogen stations. In the 1960s, several important contributions were made in developing basic models and their solution methods. One of the earliest location‐allocation models was the minisum problem, which finds a given number of locations that minimize the total distance between users and facilities. This and other basic location models have been extended by incorporating various realistic factors. With the more recent development of mathematical optimization solvers as well as geographical information systems, location‐allocation analysis will continue to be an active research area for diverse disciplines and contribute to decision‐making solutions to a variety of public and private sector problems.
Graph Theory
Authors: Ducruet César
Published: March 2017

Originally a branch of mathematics designed to formalize the topological properties of networks, graph theory has evolved dramatically in the last two decades through interdisciplinary research encompassing both social and natural scientists. Geographers, who have been actively pushing for the integration of graph theoretical methods into geography in the 1960s have somewhat neglected recent advances in network theory and analysis originating from graph theory.
Waste and Waste Management
Authors: Lepawsky Josh
Published: March 2017

Waste is usually defined as something to be discarded as unwanted, unusable, or as a byproduct. There are several broad categories of waste generally recognized: industrial waste, municipal (or household) waste, and hazardous or special wastes such as radioactive and biohazardous waste. Waste management refers to the governance and handling of solid, liquid, and gaseous materials externalized by some actor, using one or a combination of strategies that include air pollution abatement, waste water treatment, landfilling, incineration, recycling, biodegradation, and waste trading. Patterns of waste management vary geographically and also involve transboundary movements of waste. Technological and economic shifts have led to the growth and centralization of the waste management industry in many countries, although scavenging and community waste management persist in places. Research into waste management relates to environmental justice, individual environmental behavior and citizenship, industrial ecology and the “afterlives” of products, as well as the ethics of waste.
Mapping Cyberspace
Authors: Xu Chen
Published: March 2017

Cyberspace is real and profoundly influences societies about their capacities to effectively organize social and economic activities. The constituent components of cyberspace include human, code, software, and hardware. The Internet provides the hardware skeleton of cyberspace. Human interactivities with all kinds of codes produce many types of cyberspace. All Internet functionalities and all human and information activities inside cyberspace are facilitated by software. This entry introduces how to map cyberspace by using different components of cyberspace.
Historical Settlement
Authors: Smith Jeffrey S.
Published: March 2017

This entry traces the evolution of world human settlement from roughly 12 000bpto the end of the European colonial period. It begins with the Neolithic Age and explains how the agricultural revolution enabled settlements to develop. Over time key locations (or cultural hearths) blessed with fertile lands and abundant water (Mesopotamia, the Nile Valley, Indus Valley, and Huang He/Yellow Valley) saw their populations grow. Beginning in the fifteenth centurybce, Greek cities emerged only to be supplanted by Roman influences. With the fall of the Roman Empire, settlement growth shifted to present‐day Europe where feudalistic influences shaped where people lived. As the age of enlightenment encouraged European governments to expand their zone of influence, distinct settlements emerged in the Western Hemisphere. The entry ends with an explanation of how European settlement of the New World progressed in three main stages.
Finance Capital and the Environment
Authors: Knox‐Hayes Janelle
Published: March 2017

Contemporary financial systems are increasingly coupled to the natural environment. The creation of markets to trade carbon emissions, forestry resources, and biodiversity demonstrates the potential of “environmental finance” to manage positive and negative externalities – environmental benefits or costs accrued from economic activities that are not accounted for in economic transactions. Environmental assets are created through privatization and commensuration, and are integrated into financial services through intermediation and exchange. Scholars of financial capital and the environment have raised concerns about practices of valuation and accounting, the integrity of financialized environmental resources, and the hybrid nature of environmental and economic systems. Additionally, spatial and temporal dynamics are essential to environmental finance and offer promising avenues of further investigation.
Spatial Analysis
Authors: Wolf Levi J. , Murray Alan T.
Published: March 2017

Spatial analysis has long been central to solving geographical problems. Broadly speaking, the goal of spatial analysis is to understand, express, and exploit order, pattern and/or structure inherent in geographically distributed phenomena. Formal techniques, relying on geographic information science, statistics, mathematics, and computation, forge a link between geographic data and useful knowledge, and therefore are utilized as part of spatial analysis. The structure of spatial data make it different from nonspatial data requiring care and attention when analytical methods are applied. Four major types of order often inherent to geographic data are spatial dependence, spatial heterogeneity, and scale and frame effects. As a result, order, pattern and structure take on special significance and must be accounted for and/or exploited. Spatial analysis is not, however, merely a simple set of tools but rather a perspective and process by which inquiry, exploration, and decision‐making are carried out. Spatial analysis is a rich and diverse domain capable of contributing to a range of research questions united by a common goal of examining order, pattern, and structure in geographic data.
Radical Geography
Authors: Pickerill Jenny
Published: March 2017

Radical geography is an approach to geographic research that seeks to understand social and spatial problems, and advocate solutions. Radical geographers are interested in everyday lives: the lived experiences of members of society. They are interested in issues of relevance to everyday social life, such as access to safe and affordable food and housing, fair pay, educational opportunities, and basic health care, to name just a few. This emphasis reflects a desire for geographers to do research that is relevant to, and useful for, society. A quest for social justice permeates much of radical geography. Radical geographers, who are often active participants in social justice campaigns, are also committed to building, supporting, and intellectualizing alternatives.
Land‐Use/Cover Change and Climate
Authors: Mahmood Rezaul , Pielke Roger A.
Published: March 2017

Land‐use/cover change (LULCC) plays an important role in the climate system. Climatic impacts of LULCC can be observed at all spatiotemporal scales. LULCC results in the modification of both biogeophysical and biogeochemical properties of the land and atmosphere. Examples of biogeophysical characteristics can be leaf area index (LAI), surface roughness, and albedo, while biogeochemical could be the carbon and nitrogen budgets. Agricultural land use, for example irrigation (additional water), can lower the long‐term maximum temperature over a region due to increase in latent energy fluxes. Irrigation may also remotely impact subcontinental scale precipitation. Deforestation, reforestation, and afforestation can also change temperatures, cloud cover, convection, and precipitation. It is found that urbanization increases temperatures and modifies local precipitation. Obviously, changes in vegetation cover due to LULCC alters carbon, nitrogen, and other cycles and temperature and precipitation. LULCC can also affect distribution of atmospheric aerosols leading to changes in temperature and precipitation.
Industrial Conversion
Authors: Hudson Ray
Published: March 2017

This entry discusses some of the main ways in which, via state policies and the actions of various civil society organizations, attempts have been made to address the problems that result as one set of industries decline in a place via restructuring those industries in situ, attracting inward investment in new activities, or developing a variety of endogenous local alternatives. The form and content of these responses has changed over time (e.g., from large to small firms, from manufacturing to services), though there is no simply linear sequence of policy responses that is universally applicable. Moreover, what has been successful in one place and time is by no means guaranteed to be so in other times and places. Given the character of capitalist economies, with the restless movement of capital in search of profits, industrial change and conversion is an ongoing process for many places.
Topological Relations
Authors: Andrea Rodríguez M.
Published: March 2017

Topological relations are binary spatial relations like Disjoint, Inside, and Overlap that are preserved under affine transformations. They are considered to be fundamental qualitative descriptions of geographic scenes. This entry reviews topological relations focusing on the formalization and definition of topological relations, the use of topological relations in query languages and for information retrieval, reasoning about topological relations, and connection between formal models and natural‐language topological terms.
Urban Redevelopment
Authors: August Martine , Walks Alan
Published: March 2017

Urban redevelopment (or urban regeneration or urban renewal) is the process of re‐establishing the profitability of declining urban districts. Redevelopment is one aspect of uneven geographical development that is characteristic of capitalist urbanization, in which urban landscapes left to decline become ripe again for reinvestment and renewed capital accumulation. Like earlier rounds of redevelopment (in Engels's Manchester, Haussmann's Paris, and with North American urban renewal), contemporary redevelopment is associated with the displacement and dispersal of lower‐income and racially marginalized residents. In the era of neoliberal urban governance and “postmodern” urbanism, redevelopment is linked with consumption‐oriented attractions for tourism and entertainment, and with gentrification.
Popular Culture
Authors: Stieve Thomas , Lukinbeal Chris
Published: March 2017

Within the past few decades, popular culture has greatly influenced both geographical thought and research areas. Geography's engagement with popular culture can be traced to humanism and landscape studies' focus on the individual and everyday life. Many forms of popular cultural production and technology such as film, television, and music have offered geographers new areas to investigate such as landscape interpretation and media geography. Geographers have also explored the role of globalization and the manufacturing of cultural products for external markets, and addressed how these developments have led to the homogenization of culture.
Corporatization of Race: An
A
merican Case Study
Authors: Wilson Bobby M.
Published: March 2017

Corporations are key operational units of economies that can become too big to fail. Their success depends on sales as much as production; just as much surplus value can be made in retailing as in production or manufacturing. Indeed, the world's largest corporation, Walmart, is now a retailer. Corporations also carry meaning for consumers that extends well beyond the price of goods and services. Since the 1880s, the US Supreme Court has ruled that corporations are legal individuals entitled to free speech rights guaranteed by the Constitution. This entry examines how race benefited the corporation, focusing on blackness and whiteness. In order for the corporation to govern production, distribution, and consumption, it regulates race‐connected practices to remain within market reach of the black consumer market. The entry focuses first on how corporations in the United States were able to extract surplus under rules governing the racial doctrine of “separate but equal.” With the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, the corporate world became increasingly less dismissive of the black body as it sought to expand commodity exchange and consumption. Corporations became interested not only in the commodification of the labor component of the black body but also in its cultural meanings. Cultural manipulation of the black consumer extracted billions of dollars in profits from this community.
Nature
Authors: Castree Noel
Published: March 2017

Since geography was founded as a university subject in the late nineteenth century, geographers have defined their research and teaching with reference to nature, explicitly or implicitly. At times, nature has been absolutely central to what most geographers do; at other times, less so. After 1945, concerns about the credibility and utility of geographers' pre‐war inquiries led to a progressive split between human and physical geography, with the former largely losing interest in the biophysical environment and in questions of “human nature.” However, since the early 1990s a preoccupation with nature has, in a range of ways and for various reasons, become quite central to research and teaching across the discipline. This has not, however, led to a new unity among physical and human geographers. Whether this state of affairs is good or not is a matter of perspective. Today, three broad approaches to nature prevail in the discipline, each comprising multiple strands: a “traditional” (or naturalist) one that regards nature as an independent object of analysis, a more recent one that questions nature's naturalness, and a newer one that would dispense with the concept of nature (and its collateral terms, like wilderness) altogether. The second and third we can call “denaturalizing” approaches. This trio reflects geographers' different conceptions of the character and aims of knowledge about the material world. The differences cannot – some might argueshouldnot – be eliminated in the quest for an ostensibly “correct” understanding of nature and its relations with society. If our knowledge of what we call “nature” is profoundlysocial, then it follows that its validity cannot be justified with reference to “material realities” alone. This is not, of course, to suggest that there is no biophysical world existing regardless of people's diverse conceptions of it. After defining “nature,” the entry is organized chronologically and charts the changing ways geographers have interrogated nature over the past century or more. It concludes by considering the relationship between the three just‐mentioned approaches.
Geography Education: Fieldwork and Contemporary Pedagogy
Authors: Day Terence , Spronken‐Smith Rachel
Published: March 2017

Geographers have taken a leading role in post‐secondary pedagogic innovation, and this is reflected in a rapidly evolving landscape of teaching and learning within the discipline. Lectures used to involve the transmission of information from the lecturer to the student but are now much more interactive, with multimedia, student discussions, interactive exercises, and formative assessment based on “clickers.” Practical and laboratory work is now much more relevant than formerly, with the use of real datasets and less emphasis on repetitive calculations. Fieldwork is still important, and although safety issues are taken seriously, equity, risk, and legal liabilities have discouraged some departments and instructors. In contrast, signature pedagogies, including experiential and service learning, along with undergraduate research and inquiry, have seen growth. Textbooks are moving into electronic formats that allow them to be more closely integrated into active learning.
Ice Shelves
Authors: Jenkins Adrian
Published: March 2017

Ice shelves are the floating parts of an ice sheet that is grounded below sea level. Since they are in contact with both atmosphere and ocean, they are sensitive indicators of climate change. Surface melting can drive ice shelf breakup, while progressive thinning is driven primarily by basal melting into the underlying ocean. Surface waters in the polar oceans are typically cooled to freezing point, so the thermal energy required to melt the ice shelves is contained in subsurface layers where the elevated pressure lowers the freezing point, in particular where waters that have been isolated from the surface retain the effects of past heating in the subtropics. Changes in the thickness and extent of the ice shelves have a direct impact on the flow of the inland ice sheet, and hence on global sea levels.
Open Innovation
Authors: Gallouj Faïz , Djellal Faridah
Published: March 2017

Innovation is a condition for the survival of businesses, companies, territories, and nations. The concept of “open innovation” is used to review a number of key aspects of the innovation issue. This metaphor is used to try to report on the major contemporary openings made by experts in “innovation studies,” and in so doing, a number of important concepts in this field are reviewed. The openings in question concern not only the modalities of organization and implementation of innovation as implied by the concept of open innovation, but also the content and forms of innovation as well as the sectors that engage in these activities.
Health Geography
Authors: Collins Damian , Evans Joshua
Published: March 2017

Geographers' long‐standing interests in the ecology of disease and the spatial organization of medical services were transformed in the early 1990s with the emergence of a new approach labeled “health geography.” Centered on the dyad of health and place, health geography's interests expanded beyond traditional concerns for disease and medicine to encompass a wider cultural focus on both “therapeutic” and “unhealthy” places. This expansion involved greater theoretical engagement with health contexts as sites of meaning and power, as well as engagement with themes such as risk and care. Health geography is renowned for qualitative approaches that are well suited to a cultural focus on place and health, although quantitative methods remain important. It is a remarkably diverse field, with concerns encompassing social inequalities in health, environmental issues, and health‐care provision; nonetheless, spanning this diversity is the centrality of place in the study of health.
Actor‐Network Theory
Authors: Greenhough Beth J.
Published: March 2017

Actor‐network theory (ANT) is an approach to research developed within the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies (STS). ANT is a constructivist approach, and asserts that phenomena should be understood as emerging from and sustained by networks of relations between heterogeneous human and nonhuman actors. Within geography ANT has been influential in: (i) advocating a “flat ontology,” which refuses to divide the world up hierarchically into different spatial scales (e.g., local, global) and instead focuses on relations, connections, and associations across space; and (ii) its insistence on the role of nonhuman agency in shaping nature‐society relations.
Participatory Video
Authors: Kindon Sara
Published: March 2017

The proliferation of video as a research and community development tool has raised questions about relationships of knowledge production, representation, and reception – specifically relationships between participation, video, and audience. Seeking to enable empowerment through people's use of storytelling and representation through video, participatory video's emancipatory agenda has come under recent scrutiny. Researchers are exploring how the media logic of technologies shape, limit, and fix what can be represented, and how processes of facilitation and group work constrain and enable different outcomes. Indigenous media discourse acknowledges the highly charged intercultural dynamics and colonial continuities associated with the politics of seeing, but is frequently overlooked. As the dissemination of participatory video products into online environments increases, more work is needed to inform ethical practices associated with consent and ownership. There is also a need to better understand the diverse audiences being both targeted and reached by participatory video products.
Intrametropolitan Location
Authors: Aguiléra Anne
Published: March 2017

At the intra‐urban scale, producer services initially located in the center of cities. This tendency was primarily explained using land rent theory. The development of more polycentric urban spaces and of producer services in the suburban employment centers since the 1990s has profoundly challenged this conceptual framework. New models explain producer service firm location choices as primarily dependent on their sensitivity to employee transportation costs, on the one hand, and to the economies of agglomeration, on the other. According to these models, decentralization of producer services can only occur after the outer metropolitan suburban centers have attained a required level of maturity and an appropriate set of positive externalities. These models also make it possible to consider the idea that the decentralization of producer services only involves those activities that are the least sensitive to informational externalities. These theoretical underpinnings are confirmed in the results of empirical studies in metropolitan areas in developed and developing countries.
Alien and Native Species
Authors: Warren Charles R.
Published: March 2017

The native/alien distinction is central to nature conservation, but both the distinction itself and policies based on it are contested. Because the terms “native” and “alien” do not describe biological characteristics but dispersal history, definitions rest on spatiotemporal boundaries which are socially constructed. Invasive alien species have severe ecological and economic impacts, and so conservationists defend the distinction and anti‐alien policies. However, opposition to all alien species in principle has been critiqued on numerous grounds, most controversially because of the parallels with racism but also because it often clashes with cultural values. Some call for the native/alien framework to be abandoned, yet it is being reinforced worldwide in conservation policy.
Climate Change and Land Ice
Authors: Rivera Andrés , Bravo Claudio , Buob Giulia
Published: March 2017

Glaciers are sensitive indicators of climate change, but the magnitude and timing of these changes depend on a variety of geographic variables. As an illustration of the relation between land ice and climate change, an outline of glacier changes taking place in the extra‐tropical Andes of Chile and Argentina since 1985 is presented. These changes are analyzed in connection to ongoing atmospheric warming, and projections of temperature and precipitation changes. After analyzing 41 glaciers located in the region, a general trend of area shrinkage has been detected. These negative changes have been detected among mountain, valley, volcanic‐related, ice‐field, freshwater, and tidewater calving glaciers. The semiarid and Mediterranean Andes, where glaciers are relatively smaller, are suffering greater percentages of areal losses; however, the biggest individual areas lost were observed in Patagonia where the retreat rates have accelerated in recent decades. If ongoing climate changes are to continue, as projected in different climate change scenarios, many of the smaller glaciers along the extra‐tropical Andes will disappear by the end of the century.
Disease and Illness, Political Ecology of
Authors: Kalipeni Ezekiel , Ghosh Jayati , Oppong Joseph
Published: March 2017

This entry offers a definition of the political ecology framework and its application to disease ecology. Political ecology is an analytical social theory framework that focuses on the relationships between political, economic, and social factors and environmental and health issues. The central elements of this framework include context, history, scale, and human agency. The argument is that human–environment relations at local, regional, and global scales can be understood only by analyzing the relationships of patterns of resource use to political economic forces. Consequently, phenomena must be situated in the broader social, environmental, and economic contexts and both the phenomena and the context should be related to a variety of scales ranging from the local to the global. With reference to health, political ecology of disease demonstrates how social, economic, and political influences help to shape the structures and events of local areas that produce disease. In this entry we offer several pertinent examples of the application of this framework and discuss its usefulness in explaining both distal and proximate causes that generate and spread disease as well as possible solutions.
Oceans and Seas: Physical Geography
Authors: Peters Kimberley
Published: March 2017

Seas and oceans constitute two thirds of the surface of the Earth. However, in spite of this geophysical dominance, they have only recently begun to attract the attention of geographers. In physical geography, seas and oceans have been explored from the coast to the deep sea using a range of techniques from traditional sampling to remote sensing to understanding geomorphic processes, sediment mobilization, earth science, and sea level rise. In human geography, seas and oceans have been recognized as places where human and physical interests meet. For example, human geographers are exploring the more‐than‐human dimensions of seas and oceans alongside investigating geopolitical questions that arise in international waters, the historical geographies of colonialism and imperialism that can be thought anew, and the embodied sensations of engaging with the “hydro” world.
Spatial Concepts
Authors: Grossner Karl
Published: March 2017

Spatial concepts are at the heart of the varied intellectual traditions of geography and are ubiquitous in many other fields and everyday life. Space itself is typically viewed from one of two perspectives: as the mathematically measurable context (with time) for natural phenomena, and as a count noun referring to societal contexts and individuals' mental models. The most fundamental of spatial concepts stem from our physical experience of the natural world, and many are described by laws of classical physics. Concepts of increasing complexity build upon such primitives. Ongoing efforts at developing orderings of spatial concepts, including taxonomies and ontologies, have been motivated by several goals. These include improving educational outcomes in the sciences and engineering (including geography and geodesign), making geographic software conform better to spatial cognitive processes, and improving spatial reasoning abilities generally. Absent a definitive ontology or even lexicon of spatial concepts, we can nevertheless begin to organize them usefully to meet the purposes outlined above.
Environmental Hazards
Authors: Kelman Ilan
Published: March 2017

Environmental processes and phenomena pervade the planet, affecting day‐to‐day and decade‐to‐decade lives and livelihoods. When they are associated with death and destruction, they are seen as environmental hazards. Defining “environmental hazards” followed by classifying them into astronomical, biological/ecological, geological, and hydrometeorological sets the stage for examining human influences on environmental processes and phenomena, especially illustrating how human activity leads environmental processes and phenomena to become hazardous. Overlaps and connections among the four categories are explored, including cascading hazards, coincidental hazards, and the hazard influencer of climate change. The final section explains the importance of living with environmental hazards rather than trying to oppose or combat them, showing how society can use knowledge of environmental processes and phenomena to avoid harm while garnering advantages.
Polar Region Ecosystems
Authors: Cairns David M.
Published: March 2017

Polar ecosystems are dominated by ice both on land and at sea. The terrestrial component of these ecosystems varies between the poles with regard to biodiversity and the importance of modern and historic glaciations. Polar ecosystems have been affected by human activities ranging from oil exploration to harvesting of marine mammals. The polar region ecosystems form integrated systems in which plants and animals are linked together and are tightly coupled with their environment. As climate changes, the polar ecosystems are expected to change dramatically in concert with the changing temperature and amount of ice that is present.
Collaborative Resource Management
Authors: Gunton Thomas
Published: March 2017

Collaborative resource planning has become the preferred model of resource management in many jurisdictions. It delegates responsibility to stakeholders who engage in face‐to‐face negotiation to develop plans by consensus. Empirical evaluations show that collaborative resource management is more likely to result in plans that are in the public interest and successfully implemented when compared to more conventional scientific‐based planning models that rely on experts to develop plans. Collaborative planning also produces additional “social capital” benefits such as improved stakeholder relations and management skills. While there are challenges in using collaborative planning, these can be overcome by using best practice guidelines.
Snow Cover Changes
Authors: Brown Ross D.
Published: March 2017

Seasonal snow covers a large fraction of the Northern Hemisphere (NH) land area (and some Southern Hemisphere mountain regions) for periods of up to 10 months of the year and is an integral part of the landscape, climate, hydrology, ecology, and economy. A snow cover (duration, depth) and its physical properties (albedo, density, crystal structure, etc.) represent an integrated response of physical processes to a number of external climate/environmental drivers. Greenhouse gas‐induced warming and moistening of mid‐ to high latitudes, increased incoming longwave radiation, and Arctic green‐up are all drivers of a changing snow cover, and there is growing evidence from surface and satellite observations of significant changes in seasonal snow cover: significant declines in spring snow cover duration are observed across the NH, and significant decreases in winter snowpack are observed over mid‐latitudes, particularly coastal mountains. Trends in snow cover simulated by climate models are for the most part consistent with observations but underestimate the observed rates of decrease in Arctic spring snow cover. Climate models have improved but important sources of uncertainty remain related to snow albedo feedbacks, high latitude precipitation, and inadequate treatment of landscape‐dependent snow processes.
Desertification
Authors: Davis Diana K.
Published: March 2017

Desertification has generated a great deal of controversy since the term was coined nearly 100 years ago. Strongly informed by a long Anglo‐European history of thinking about desert regions and indigenous people, desertification most commonly conjures images of spreading deserts that threaten lives and livelihoods. This largely colonial notion, however, has been disproved as it has been shown repeatedly that deserts are not inexorably expanding. Moreover, the severity and extent of dryland degradation was significantly exaggerated during the twentieth century. Dryland degradation, particularly from over‐irrigation and increasing dryland agriculture in marginal areas, has occurred but in limited areas for specific reasons. Despite broad scientific and academic consensus that desertification is limited in dryland nonequilibrium environments that are quite resilient, a majority of policy from the local to the international level continues to implement outdated techniques to try to “roll back the desert.”