bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Global Production Networks
Authors: Hess Martin
Published: March 2017

Contemporary capitalism is characterized by a high degree of economic globalization; uneven regional, national, and international development; and increasing fragmentation of production activities within and across borders, among other things. The global production network (GPN) framework has been developed in economic geography and cognate disciplines since the turn of the century as a heuristic device to better understand and analyze these processes and their implications for regional socioeconomic development. GPNs are socially and geographically embedded, multiscalar systems of value creation, enhancement, and capture, orchestrated and governed by complex networks of firms, governments, and civil society actors. Their dynamics and configurations have powerful consequences for development, from the local to the global, catching the attention of researchers but also, more recently, policymakers and international organizations.
Ontology: Theoretical Perspectives
Authors: Couclelis Helen
Published: March 2017

Two very different meanings of “ontology” are represented in contemporary geography. Humanistic and critical geographers understand ontology in the traditional philosophical sense of “what exists in the world,” while geographic information science has adopted the recent computational usage of “a [formal] specification of a conceptualization.” The former meaning motivates theoretical analyses and discourses inspired by the work of major philosophers, whereas the latter is meant primarily to facilitate the efficient and consistent retrieval and use of information across databases. These two distinct understandings of ontology meet at the philosophical level, where explicit or implicit philosophical choices (especially those between realist and nonrealist philosophies) influence in both cases how ontologies are construed, interpreted, and applied. Despite major differences in interpretation and use, ontology is one of the rare theoretical concepts that are common to humanistic, critical, and quantitative geography.
Environmental Risk Analysis
Authors: Kasperson Roger E.
Published: March 2017

This entry gives particular attention to the evolution of thought in environmental risk analysis and particularly geography's contributions to it. Early work on natural hazards has extended into risks associated with technological change, including such topics as uncertainty, the causal structure of risk, risk management strategies, the social amplification of risk, risk communication, and resilience.
Representation and Presentation
Authors: Hanna Stephen P. , Del Casino Vincent J.
Published: March 2017

Representation, including the presentation of spatial patterns in maps and diagrams, is a contested concept at the core of geography, cartography, and GIScience. Since the 1950s, scholars and practitioners engaging with maps as both products and practices have situated representation in the science of communication and geovisualization on the one hand or within critical social theory on the other. More recently, some research attempts to operationalize feminist, participatory, and other critical approaches within GIScience's formalistic logic of representation. Finally, voluntary mapping and the visualization of big data have created new challenges to all understandings of the ways maps work to represent the world.
Colonialism, Decolonization, and Neocolonialism
Authors: Watts Michael J.
Published: March 2017

Modern colonialism in its various norms and forms extended over the period from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. In the New World, which had been subjected to Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Dutch colonial rule in the
First Age of Colonialism
, the first wave of decolonization occurred in the eighteenth century. In this regard, the so‐called
Classical Age of Imperialism
in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was short, the first decolonizations of the second wave being achieved after the end of World War II. The two cycles of imperialism both concluded with a limited phase of decolonization followed by the rapid collapse of empires and an irresistible push to political independence. What neocolonialism as an analytical category offered was a critical sense of how this process occurred and whether it was in any sense complete.
Transportation and Land Use
Authors: Sultana Selima
Published: March 2017

The relationship between transportation and land use remains complex, particularly when they are poorly synchronized and cause externalities such as congestion, air pollution, and environmental damage. This entry provides an overview of the changing interactions between transportation and land use as seen in a historical context by reviewing theories, models, and the recent empirical evidence from the field of transportation. The entry concludes with two key points: first, that the integration of information and communication technology effects is required to better understand the link between transportation and land use; and, second, that transit‐oriented development (TOD) remains a possibility for utilizing existing suburban areas more effectively to mitigate externalities arising from the dominance of automobile‐oriented land‐use patterns.
Participatory Geographies
Authors: Askins Kye
Published: March 2017

Participatory geographies involve approaches to research, learning, and teaching that engage in the world, with local people and communities as co‐researchers and coproducers of knowledge,
as
/toward progressive change. Drawing from feminism, critical race theory, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism, they are enacted through an ethical orientation to mutual collaboration, emphasizing process and iterative reflection, learning and action, with co‐researchers central to driving and benefiting from any project. Critically, participatory geographies make visible and respond to issues of power, inequality, voice, agency, and diversity, engaging in the contested and “messy” lived realities and social relations of everyday places, as relational across and through multiple scales.
Spatial Thinking, Cognition, and Learning
Authors: Downs Roger M.
Published: March 2017

Spatial thinking is a distinctive, universal, and powerful form of thinking used in problem solving in multiple disciplines and in real‐world activities. Space, representation, and reasoning are inseparably integrated in spatial thinking and therefore it is, and has always been, central to the teaching and practice of geography in schools, academia, and occupations. Spatial thinking can be learned and should be taught at all levels in the formal education system because life in our spatial world is inconceivable without the aid of spatial thinking. After providing a definition of spatial thinking, this entry sets it into three contexts: geography, psychology, and education.
Environmental Change and Social Learning
Authors: Morrison T.H. , Hettiarachchi Missaka , Seabrook Leonie , McAlpine Clive
Published: March 2017

Pervasive environmental change, and the failure of top‐down technical solutions to respond to such change, has triggered a paradigm shift in environmental management. A social‐ecological systems approach, which recognizes the social and institutional dimensions shaping ecosystem processes and dynamics, has emerged. Within this paradigm, the concept of social learning has gained traction, with a substantial effort devoted to understanding the way in which social learning can build social‐ecological resilience and adaptive capacity. In recent years, the conceptual and practical limits of social learning have scaled up the focus, from a concentration on the processes of social learning to a focus on the design of multiscalar governance regimes that can facilitate social learning.
Corporate Spatial Organization and Producer Services
Authors: Faulconbridge James R. , Beaverstock Jonathan V. , Hall Sarah
Published: March 2017

There are three main trends in the corporate spatial organization of producer services: the urban fix of firms, the internationalization of firms, and the spatial organization used to coordinate the work of firms. Short case studies of accountancy, executive search, and executive education producer service firms are used to illustrate the key themes. The overriding message is that it is impossible to understand the organization of producer services without taking their spatiality into account.
Fertility
Authors: Underhill‐Sem Yvonne
Published: March 2017

Fertility is understood most widely in geography as one of the three determinants of population change, alongside migration and mortality. Everyone is born, everyone moves geographically in some manner, and everyone eventually dies. Such self‐evident understanding belies the importance of the conceptual framing of these processes, and none more so than fertility. There have been longstanding calls for the analysis of fertility to move beyond method and concern with techniques of measurement and toward being able to ask more critical questions. The intersection and interrelationship of material and discursive fields in relation to bodies and places is a critical place from which the analysis of fertility can expand. Fertility studies in geography are an important route into working with contemporary social justice issues around women's sexual and reproductive health and rights.
Culture
Authors: Gibson Chris
Published: March 2017

“Culture” is a polysemic term associated with the subdiscipline of cultural geography, used as a verb or noun, to denote material practices of cultivation and creativity, a quality of purported advancement (“cultured”), a way of life for groups or geographical regions, or the circulation of knowledges and meanings. Colonial uses of culture that denigrated “other” peoples have been discredited, as have “superorganic” theories of culture as a distinctive force. Feminist, poststructuralist, anticolonial, and queer influences have resulted in culture being interpreted as a zone of politics, power relations, and contestation. Increasingly, too, the term is challenged for its antonymic opposition to nature, a binary construct that privileges the human subject over nonhuman others. And yet national and linguistic traditions in interpreting culture persist, with older meanings still considered legitimate in some quarters. The result is a highly varied, spatially uneven use of the term within geography.
Glacial Erosional Processes and Landforms
Authors: Blomdin Robin , Harbor Jonathan
Published: March 2017

Glacial erosional processes include abrasion, plucking, and physical and chemical erosion by glacial meltwater. Rates of glacial erosion range from 10
−4
to 10
1
mm year
−1
and glaciers are one of the most effective erosional agents in the earth‐surface system. Glacial erosion produces both small‐scale landforms, for example, striations, grooves, and chatter marks, and classic large‐scale landforms such as U‐shaped valleys and fjords. At the landscape scale, patterns of erosion are linked to subglacial temperature conditions under glaciers or ice sheets. Warm‐based areas have high erosion rates and leave behind well‐developed glacial landscapes while areas of cold‐based ice have negligible erosion rates and leave behind poorly developed glacial landforms.
Labor Migration
Authors: Arnold Dennis
Published: March 2017

Given the scale and importance of labor migration, it is not surprising that it has attracted the attention of geographers for many years, as spatial mobility and movement are inherently geographical. The contribution of geographers to our understanding of the patterns and impacts of such flows is significant and, as advances in social theory have been adopted in the discipline, the study of migration has developed in exciting ways. The complexity and multitudinous approaches to labor migration research are a challenge. When studying labor migration, it is necessary to move beyond the tidy world of academic disciplines, since migration is multifaceted, having cultural, economic, political, and social dimensions.
Soils and the Carbon Cycle
Authors: Harden Jennifer W. , Sanderman Jonathan , Hugelius Gustaf
Published: March 2017

Soils currently store more than twice as much carbon as our current atmosphere and can sequester or release carbon dioxide (CO
2
) through their capacity to store organic matter. This CO
2
exchange provides a service to the atmosphere through the regulation of CO
2
levels and their warming potential and to our ecosystems through the regulation of organic matter and its water and nutrient storage. Carbon stored in the soils of northern regions represents about half of this global soil organic carbon. Thus, with recent warming and thawing of arctic soils, many assessments are targeted to study permafrost soils and how thawing will impact atmospheric carbon budgets and global warming. Meanwhile, deliberate land management strategies in temperate and tropical regions could potentially sequester large amounts of CO
2
in soils, helping to mediate future warming. Understanding the science behind the soil processing, mapping, and land management of soil carbon is therefore an emergent priority for earth sciences.
Housing
Authors: Hammel Daniel J.
Published: March 2017

Housing is one of the most fundamental of human needs, but it is also the focus of sophisticated global finance and the subject of much attention from policymakers in almost every nation. Housing provides shelter but is also imbued with significant cultural meanings regarding home, family, and property. In cities, housing has a distinct geography that often illustrates societal preferences and biases and, in many cities, this results in a high degree of segregation by wealth, ethnicity, and race. The provision of housing is often an important component of national economies and it has long been the subject of significant policy initiatives. Most recently, housing provision is becoming more a function of the market and less the responsibility of national or local governments. This neoliberal turn in housing has had significant impacts on the global economy, and is most clearly seen in the economic crisis of 2007. It has also fundamentally changed the experience of procuring housing for people in many countries. Housing and housing provision also have significant impacts on a wide range of social, political, and environmental issues, which in turn connect the study of housing to larger geographic forces and geographic theories.
Tropical Geography
Authors: Clayton Daniel
Published: March 2017

Tropical geography emerged as a distinct research area within geography after World War II, and most evidently in Western counties that had (or once had) tropical colonies. The French geographer Pierre Gourou was its best known exponent, but Gourou's work and influence illustrates that tropical geography cannot be considered in isolation from an encompassing and centuries‐old body of Western ideas and assumptions about the exoticism of the tropical world – a discourse that has been termed “tropicality.” Tropicality has intimate connections with both European empire‐building and the formation of a modern discipline of geography, and the imbrications of tropical geography and tropicality have been of critical interest to geographers concerned with the Eurocentrism that pervades their discipline's heritage.
Environment and Resources, Political Economy of
Authors: Huber Matthew T.
Published: March 2017

This entry traces the different approaches to understanding the relations between capitalism, resources, and the environment. Theoretically, it argues that the majority of approaches in geography have attempted to transcend the dualism between society and nature via theories of nature itself as socially produced. Historically, geographers have been critical of “neoliberal” efforts in mainstream economic and policy circles to “internalize” various ecological processes and environmental costs into the market/price system. Yet, the theoretical approach to nature–capital relations depends in large part upon the materiality of the “environment” in question. Thus, the rest of the entry reviews differing theoretical approaches in relation to diverse material aspects of nature: ecological conditions, resources, energy, and biological life.
Green Infrastructure
Authors: O'Neill Phillip
Published: March 2017

Green infrastructure is used in planning and policy domains as an expression to draw attention to the essential place of green spaces and ecosystems in cities and populated regions. The term attempts to draw on the idea that infrastructure assets are crucial to human life, especially urban life, in the ways they create orderly flows and movements, make resources available, enhance productivity, and connect places efficiently. Moreover, green infrastructure, and its deployment of protected habitats and nurtured ecosystems as assets, is seen to make cities and regions more efficient and sustainably prosperous through the provision of common green spaces and the generation of shared ecological services. Bundling the natural environment into the category of green infrastructure, however, can be criticized for reducing elements of the natural environment to a status beneath that of humans, or as having purpose only related to human need. Discussion of the Los Angeles River is used to investigate this positioning.
Cosmopolitanism
Authors: Yeoh Brenda S.A.
Published: March 2017

In the light of rapid globalization processes, cosmopolitanism discourses espousing a culture of openness to difference have (re)gained currency in the scholarly literature. Notwithstanding some wariness concerning its inherent politics and elitist contours, geographers have drawn on the concept to frame studies of diversity and difference, particularly with regard to spaces of encounter conditioned by otherness, multiplicity, heterogeneity, and plurality. In applying the geographical imagination to grounding cosmopolitanism in place, three themes come into focus: cosmopolitanism in urban encounters; cosmopolitanism in relations of care; and cosmopolitanism from the margins.
Voluntarism and the Voluntary Sector
Authors: Skinner Mark , Power Andrew
Published: March 2017

Understanding voluntarism in an era of globalization, state restructuring, and demographic ageing has become a key research and policy challenge in the twenty‐first century. Across the world, and in countries of the Global North in particular, the voluntary sector has evolved into a source of welfare provisioning alongside the state, as well as a space of resistance at local, subnational, and international levels. Over the past four decades, the spatially uneven landscapes of voluntarism and the place‐specific nature of voluntary sector organizations and volunteering have become increasingly clear. There is growing recognition of the crucial difference geography makes to understanding the processes, outcomes, and implications of voluntary sector activities within particular contexts (from the metropolitan to the remote) and among various scales (from the global to the individual).
Nation‐State
Authors: Stokke Kristian
Published: March 2017

The concept of nation‐state highlights the state as a community, that is, the state as a focal point for national identity, and the nation as a source of legitimacy for the state. Nation‐states are central to geographic scholarship and especially studies of nationalism, nation‐state formation, and citizenship. Contemporary state–community relations in nation‐states are characterized by an increasingly complex geography of citizenship, as global changes have challenged the nation‐state model of citizenship and political struggles for citizenship are constituted within and across multiple scales, spaces, and places.
Geopolitics
Authors: Reuber Paul
Published: March 2017

Geopolitics is a practice of knowledge production. As a result of its long history, it includes a wide range of explanations that can be arranged according to four major perspectives: (i) geopolitical representations in politics, media, and science; (ii) the geopolitical discourse itself as a formation of space power; (iii) the “doing geopolitics” of political actors who draw on hegemonic geopolitical imaginations in order to legitimize their political reasoning and practices; and (iv) the academic deconstruction of geopolitical discourses and practices from a critical geopolitical perspective, or rather a poststructuralist political geography.
Venture Capital
Authors: Zhang Jun
Published: March 2017

The basic terms and procedures of venture capital are introduced, and the various geographic dimensions of venture capital discussed. Venture capital investment is highly susceptible to distance, and the co‐location of venture capital centers and high‐tech clusters are common. But venture capital investment flows are not necessarily confined by the geography of supply; globalization is underway. The evolution and impact of venture capital relies on politically charged, socially devised territorial institutions. The connection between venture capital and industrial innovation is not straightforward.
Free Trade Zone
Authors: Zhang Jun
Published: March 2017

Free trade zones (FTZs) are geographically delimited, fenced‐in, duty‐free areas, offering warehousing, storage, separate customs, streamlined procedures and distribution facilities for trade, trans‐shipment, and re‐export operations. Led by the Asian Tigers and China, FTZs have proliferated across the world since 1960s. However, success has been limited, and there is a danger of race‐to‐the‐bottom competition between hosts of FTZs. The challenge to achieving economic and social upgrading remains daunting.
Network Analysis
Authors: Curtin Kevin M.
Published: March 2017

Network analysis in geography is a subdiscipline that has persisted from the earliest days of the science yet remains an active research area today. Network analysis has had an influence on practical applications and theoretical advances. A mathematical foundation for network analysis in graph theory and topology has led to methods for describing and measuring networks, for determining locations within networks, and for analyzing movement across networks. The broad interest in network analysis has encouraged its rapid adoption into geographic information systems and this, in turn, has engendered increased development of advanced network analytic techniques – notably network spatial statistics and linear referencing. Advances in network analysis continue today, with spatiotemporal network analysis and social‐network analysis being of particular interest across a broad set of application areas.
Deindustrialization
Authors: Daniels Peter W.
Published: March 2017

Deindustrialization represents a reversal of an earlier period of structural change in societies and economies that involved a shift from agrarian pursuits to industrial activities. In this sense it is the opposite of industrialization. The process has been widely observed in the advanced economies since the 1970s. Some of the causes of deindustrialization are considered, along with an illustration of its key attributes as measured by structural changes in employment in the advanced economies and, more recently, in the emerging economies.
Paleosols
Authors: Brandon Curry B.
Published: March 2017

The term “Paleosol” refers to a fossil soil, or remnants thereof, either preserved at modern land surface or buried by layers of younger sediment. The study of Paleosols is referred to as paleopedology. Paleosols preserve evidence of past physical and chemical weathering (such as reddening due to oxidation of iron), macro‐biological activity (such as burrowing and additions of organic matter), microbial activity (reduction of iron or gleying), and/or additions of younger sediment and the depositional processes associated with them. Modern soil characteristics and processes, and their relationship to the contemporary environment, are the “keys to the past” and provide the basis for interpreting past climate, vegetation, and other environmental conditions from Paleosols. Paleosols are also a primary component of allostratigraphy, a branch of stratigraphy that uses unconformities and their cross‐cutting relationships for correlating sedimentary successions. Paleosols that serve as allostratigraphic marker beds are more formalized and thus are referred to as Geosols. Challenges for future research on Paleosols include seeking improved field and laboratory methods to differentiate the original from the diagenetically altered characteristics, due to postburial change, as well as autochthonous from allochthonous materials. For example, many changes in Paleosol profile chemistry and mineralogy classically have been attributed to in situ mineral weathering. These concepts are challenged by the relatively recent discovery of dust accumulations in surface soils. Answering questions of this sort often requires the use of mass balance techniques (including trace elements and isotopes) and micromorphology. Continued advances in dating methods, particularly luminescence techniques, will provide better temporal context for many Paleosols and associated sediments. Collectively, improved analytical chemistry and chronology will improve our assessment of the characteristics of soil‐forming intervals, and answer the longstanding question as to whether rates of soil formation were faster during optimum conditions in the past.
Spatial Interaction
Authors: Stewart Fotheringham A.
Published: March 2017

Spatial interaction is the lifeblood of all economic systems from the smallest communities to the largest cities. It is a generic term for any form of movement or transmission over space that results from a decision‐making process. This entry covers the basic elements of spatial interaction and the forms of mathematical models that are used to understand the processes that influence interaction and to predict future interactions.
Point‐of‐Interest Databases and Gazetteers
Authors: Goodchild Michael F.
Published: March 2017

Point‐of‐interest databases and gazetteers both serve to locate named features on the Earth's surface; they differ only in the purposes for which they were constructed, and by whom. Today any distinction between them is largely irrelevant. Interest in such place‐name databases (PNDs) has been growing recently, as geographic web services aimed at the general public have proliferated. PNDs now provide support for the interface to mapping, wayfinding, and more sophisticated online services. The basic elements of PNDs include name, location, and type, while demand is growing for richer information on the associations of places, and for information about hierarchical relationships between places. Most PNDs provide only point locations, which severely limits the services they can support. New and more sophisticated applications are emerging, along with new sources of data that can be used to improve PND content and accuracy, and to provide for maintenance and updating.
Creative Class
Authors: Leslie Deborah
Published: March 2017

According to Richard Florida, recent years have seen the rise of a creative class, made up of workers employed in the knowledge, professional, technical, arts, and cultural sectors. These workers create new products, designs, and symbols.
Affect
Authors: Anderson Ben
Published: March 2017

While there is no single definition of “affect” in human geography, the term most commonly refers to a body's capacities to affect and to be affected. While indebted to a number of precursors, principally feminist work on emotions, research on affect has been associated with the emergence of nonrepresentational theories. Within what is now a heterogeneous body of work, there are now multiple ways of understanding how affects emerge from, and are part of, sociospatial processes.
Color Theory
Authors: Griffin Amy L.
Published: March 2017

Color theory includes several sets of ideas about how colors can or should relate to each other. Today, the use of color in maps is commonplace, a result of the increasing ease and economy with which map production technologies can create it. Fundamentally, the effective use of color in maps relies on a solid understanding of the human visual system and its particularities. Color is often described as being composed of three dimensions: hue, lightness, and saturation. Color schemes that are commonly used when making maps rely on matching these color dimensions to data characteristics. Colors on maps can be specified using different color models, depending on whether the map is produced digitally or printed on paper.
Biotechnology
Authors: McManus Phil
Published: March 2017

Biotechnology is the application of technology to modify the genetic characteristics of living organisms. This modification is intended to result in “improved” products but it is not always successful, and it can have unintended consequences. This, argue proponents of biotechnology, is an extension of activities conducted over thousands of years to create new products, or emphasize particular characteristics within existing life forms. Geographers have a longstanding interest in nature and environmental concerns, and are often interested in how biotechnology modifies physical properties and our understanding of the world. Biotechnology is increasingly challenging not only how we understand the world outside of us but what it means to be human. Proponents of biotechnology see the challenges for the future as being how to create new products, improved manipulation processes and new applications for biotechnology. For geographers, and others, not directly involved in the development and application of biotechnology, the main interest is in contested discourses surrounding biotechnology and the multiple and sometimes overlapping ethical concerns associated with biotechnology.
Health and Wellbeing
Authors: Atkinson Sarah
Published: March 2017

The concept of wellbeing has changed since the 1960s from a collective notion through which geographers might compare territorial units into an individualized and largely subjective concept. The rise in political rhetoric around positioning wellbeing as the goal of policy has generated a rapid increase in research across the social sciences, including geography. Geographical research has contributed to a range of issues within contemporary debates on wellbeing, including four concerns presented here: the spatial variation in defining wellbeing, the multiscalar nature of wellbeing, the positioning of wellbeing as outcome and process, and the contributions of relationally oriented geographies. New directions shaping emergent geographies of wellbeing draw on assemblage, nonrepresentational theories, and a greater attention to time.
Safe Haven
Authors: Mountz Alison
Published: March 2017

“Safe haven” is an internationally recognized term assigned to a geographic area designated to provide protection from harm. Yet the concept holds different meanings in different contexts, and contradictions between intent and usage emerge. The term has been applied to many different kinds of location, from buildings to camps and entire cities designated as safe for those fleeing violence elsewhere. The term operates across scales, to connect the body to local and global politics. It is also a practice that often houses alternative political projects, such as the containment and control of human mobility. Within geography, the term has been used in the context of migration and refugee flows, and in debates about the provision of protection in the form of geographically designated safe havens.
Natural Hazards and Disasters
Authors: Gaillard J.C.
Published: March 2017

Apprehending the causes of disasters associated with natural hazards has stimulated much discussion among geographers. In particular, they have debated about the relative role of natural versus human factors in the increasing, but spatially unequal, occurrence of documented disasters. These debates have had a powerful influence on disaster risk management as well as postdisaster reconstruction policies and practices.
Climate and Societal Impacts
Authors: Polsky Colin
Published: March 2017

Climate shapes the behavior of all living organisms, including humans. Changes in climate should therefore affect human and ecosystem wellbeing. Yet isolating the impacts of a changed climate is challenging because the climate change does not unfold in a vacuum. Instead, multiple non‐climate (social or biophysical) processes may amplify or attenuate the impacts of the changed climate. Recent climate impacts scholarship focuses on land use, emergency response, and long‐term adaptation as important mechanisms for modulating the impact of climate. Three domains for research emphasis appear needed and promising for the coming years: continued cataloging of observed as opposed to projected climate impacts, improved synthesis of existing (even if apparently disparate) climate impacts studies, and an enhanced understanding of the process of adaptation to the short‐term effects of climate exposures.
Food Security
Authors: Sage Colin
Published: March 2017

Food security has become an increasingly important, but contested, term since the global food price spike of 2008. Ongoing price volatility, linked to a range of causal drivers, has raised the stakes in formulating solutions to feeding a world of 9 billion by 2050. In contrast to those who favor treating food security as a scientific problem requiring technical solutions that lead to greater output are those who promote food sovereignty and a rights‐based approach to food. With global food production facing a range of interlocking challenges, there are strong grounds to believe that food security might be reframed to accommodate the principles of sustainability, social justice, and dietary health encompassed by the food sovereignty approach.
Landscape
Authors: Rose Mitch
Published: March 2017

Landscape studies has always been an influential subfield in geography, and has had a significant impact on the development and trajectory of cultural geography in North America and the United Kingdom. The entry reviews the subfield by assessing three predominant schools: the traditional school, the new cultural school, and the phenomenological school. While these schools are often presented chronologically (as if one school replaces the other), they represent three distinct approaches to landscape, all of which are alive and well and which continue to shape the discipline in innovative ways.
Lake Ice
Authors: Boucher Étienne , Lemay Mickael , Bégin Yves
Published: March 2017

Ice floods are among the most important disturbances affecting lakeshore ecology and landforms in seasonally cold environments. They occur in spring, when flood water still covered by thick, mechanically intact ice overflows the shores and impinges against the terrestrial/aquatic interface, with drastic consequences for the maintenance and evolution of lacustrine ecosystems.
Soil Development: Conceptual and Theoretical Models
Authors: Amundson Ronald
Published: March 2017

Our view and definition of soil is derived through the lens of theory. In the nineteenth century, Vasily Dokuchaev articulated that soil is a natural body on the landscape, one whose properties are determined by a set of factors or variables. This concept essentially is the modern definition of soil and forms the underlying theory of soil science, or pedology. The establishment of this organizing framework has helped the field to grow and expand, with the development or adaptation of models that greatly advance our understanding of how soils form, where they are distributed, and how they participate in the global geochemical cycles. The transformation of soils‐based conceptual models to more quantitative, mathematical models has been an important step in pedology's evolution, as illustrated by the recent adaptation of quantitative physical and chemical mass balance models.
Regional Definition and Classification
Authors: Dijkstra Lewis , Poelman Hugo
Published: March 2017

After outlining the development of regional classification in the European Union, two recent regional and two recent local classifications created by the European Commission using the population grid are explained. Each regional classification is linked to a local one. The first pair is the urban–rural regional typology and the (local) degree of urbanization. The second consists of the city and commuting zone (local) definition and the metro region. The grid concepts and the four classifications have been applied to all the European Union, Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein. Eurostat collects and disseminates data using four of these classifications. These data are important inputs for policy analysis, in particular of urban and rural issues.
Cultural Geography
Authors: Pow C.P.
Published: March 2017

As a subdiscipline that has evolved from a number of inherited intellectual traditions, cultural geography is often seen to have experienced several paradigmatic shifts and turns over the past decades. Yet to speak of turns and shifts seems to imply that the trajectory of geographical scholarship always necessarily travels in a unilinear pathway even if the intellectual terrain is often circuitous. To the extent that the term “old” and “new” are frequently deployed as convenient descriptors for framing the development of cultural geography, such dichotomous representation can often lead to an oversimplified view of the complex evolution of intellectual ideas and the different competing schools of thought. As cultural geography develops further, new critical challenges abound even as the subdiscipline continues to reinvent itself.
Feminist Political Ecology
Authors: Sundberg Juanita
Published: March 2017

Feminist political ecology is a subfield that brings feminist theory, objectives, and practices to political ecology, which is an analytical framework based on the assumption that ecological issues must be understood and analyzed in relation to political economy (and vice versa). Feminist political ecologists hold that gender is a crucial variable – in relation to class, race, and other relevant dimensions of political ecological life – in constituting access to, control over, and knowledge of natural resources. In addition, research in feminist political ecology demonstrates how social identities are constituted in and through relations with nature and everyday material practices.
Mass Movements in Periglacial Environments
Authors: Stoffel Markus , Huggel Christian
Published: March 2017

Changes in temperature and precipitation have a range of impacts, including change of glacier extent, extent and duration of snow cover, and distribution and thermal properties of permafrost. Climatic changes are also likely to affect the frequency and magnitude of mass movements, such as landslides, debris flows, rock slope failures, or ice avalanches. However, changes in mass‐movement activity can only hardly be detected in observational records so far. Documented here is the role of climate variability and change on mass‐movement processes in mountains, through the description and analysis of selected, recent mass movements where the effects of global warming and the occurrence of heavy precipitation are thought to have contributed to, or triggered, events. Also assessed are possible effects of future climatic changes on the incidence of mass‐movement processes.
Lithologic Discontinuities in Soils
Authors: Ahr Steven W. , Nordt Lee C. , Schaetzl Randall J.
Published: March 2017

Lithologic discontinuities are significant changes in particle size distribution or mineralogy that represent lithological differences within a soil column. Lithologic discontinuities in soils occur globally and are present when two or more different, vertically stacked, parent materials exist within a profile due to variations in past geologic or depositional processes. Recognition of these types of lithologic changes is important because pedogenesis and pedogenic interpretations are greatly influenced by changes in parent material. Also, knowledge of lithologic discontinuities provides important information about past geologic and sedimentologic processes, which pre‐date the start of soil formation. Numerous techniques have been developed to identify lithologic discontinuities in soils, including examination of depth functions of particle size classes and immobile/stable minerals. Weathering, pedoturbation, and other processes that move and disturb soils, however, can complicate the detection of discontinuities, or even destroy them. Thus, multiple lines of evidence are often necessary for accurate interpretation.
Coasts
Authors: Glavovic Bruce C.
Published: March 2017

The coast attracts people because of its beauty, productivity, and the immense array of benefits coastal ecosystems provide. Coastal ecosystems are, however, among the most threatened on Earth, jeopardizing the livelihoods and wellbeing of those living at the land–sea interface. Moreover, future prospects are bleak because global environmental change, and climate change in particular, is compounding coastal hazard risks and making coasts less suitable for human habitation. Coastal management aims to address these challenges and unlock opportunities for sustainable coastal development. The promise of coastal management has not been realized despite concerted effort and the wide range of innovative practices underway. Transformative change is needed in how the coast is governed. Coastal governance practices that build adaptive capacity, resilience, and sustainability need to become progressively more people‐centered and empowering; ecosystem‐based; participatory and collaborative; holistic and integrative; visionary, strategic, and contingent; risk averse and precautionary; deliberative and reflexive.
Global Commodity/Value Chains
Authors: Leslie Deborah
Published: March 2017

A global commodity chain is made up of all the processes associated with the production of one good or service, including manufacturing, consumption, design, retailing, marketing, advertising, and disposal. The global commodity chain (GCC) approach traces the relationships between these sites, exploring how the production of goods and services both reflects and also reproduces patterns of uneven development in the global economy. This entry reviews the literature on global commodity chains and later variations of this work, known as global value chain (GVC) approaches.
Livelihoods
Authors: Turner Sarah
Published: March 2017

The livelihoods and sustainable livelihoods literature emerged in the mid‐ to late 1980s as a means for academics and applied development practitioners to better analyze how people make a living within a given socioeconomic, political, and geographic context. A number of different frameworks that stem from this work draw on conceptual tools such as capitals/assets, access, diversification strategies, vulnerability context, and transforming structures and processes. Livelihoods frameworks have the common goal of achieving a holistic, actor‐focused understanding of how individuals and households work to create and sustain a means of gaining a living, often set within a context of poverty or vulnerability. In addition, sustainable livelihoods frameworks encourage the consideration of how livelihoods might contribute to net benefits over the short and long terms.
Empire
Authors: Clayton Daniel
Published: March 2017

“Empire” is one of the most potent words in the English language and the subject of a vast and eclectic literature. Empire's core (transhistorical) attributes are expansion, hierarchy, and order, which give spatiality to the organization of empires. Geographers have been concerned with how the development of their discipline has dovetailed that of empire. But the liaison between geography and empire is not just a disciplinary affair. The spatiality of empire can be projected on to a much larger screen.
GIS
: History
Authors: Waters Nigel
Published: March 2017

An account is given of the military, government, and academic antecedents that preceded the formal development of GIS in terms of software, hardware, and conceptual developments. The widely recognized origin of the first GIS, the Canada Geographic Information System, during the 1960s is described. Accomplishments of the Harvard Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis are reviewed, along with the formation of Esri and other leading software companies. Developments in academia, including the establishment of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis in 1988 and the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science in 1995, are discussed. The origins of geographic information science in the early 1990s and its importance in redefining the field of GIS and the reactions to this new orientation are explained. New trends in GIS, including public participation GIS, volunteered geographic information, cloud computing, big data, geodesign, and a people‐based geographic information science, are reviewed.
Economic Geography
Authors: Sheppard Eric , Barnes Trevor J.
Published: March 2017

Anglophone economic geography has played a central role in the evolution of human geography, including its various philosophical and theoretical shifts, from neocolonial commercial geography, through regional economic geography, spatial science, and location theory, to Marxism, feminism, and poststructuralism. It is currently extremely diverse, reflecting the breadth of approaches in the discipline, including a variety of quantitative and qualitative methodologies. This diversity is a strength rather than a weakness, if approached in the spirit of engaged pluralism. Perhaps the discipline's principal contemporary unifying theme is the commitment by the majority of its practitioners to some aspect of a geographical political economy – to the idea that capitalism is an unstable, conflict‐ridden political economic system characterized by geographically uneven development, whose spatiotemporal evolution is shaped by reciprocal relations between political‐economic, cultural, and biophysical processes. Major current areas of research in anglophone economic geography include geographies of production and consumption, labor relations and the body, governance and regulation, financialization, nature–economy relations, globalization and development, and diverse (more than capitalist) economies.
Point Pattern Analysis
Authors: Spielman Seth E.
Published: March 2017

Point pattern analysis is a set of methods for the detection of patterns in maps that contain a set of locations. Typically, these locations are points where some sort of event has occurred – the location of a car crash, a crime, a seed germinating. Point pattern analysis is used to determine the presence or absence of structure in a map of locations. Point pattern analysis is a statistical enterprise involving formal statistical tests of null hypotheses. Inferences about structure in point patterns are dependent upon both the scale of the analysis and the assumptions (or model) used to generate the null hypothesis. Point pattern analysis is gaining contemporary relevance as mobile devices, information technologies, and global positioning systems facilitate the large‐scale collection of geolocated information.
Sustainable Development
Authors: Krueger Rob
Published: March 2017

This entry examines sustainable development as a historically embedded process that is part of larger social, economic, and institutional contexts, each of which has implications for how sustainable development is defined. It takes a historical view of development, resource scarcity, and technological substitution, to show how these concepts are central components to the sustainable development paradigm. The entry also examines how social equity is the missing leg of sustainable development's three‐legged stool. The entry finishes with a brief discussion of post‐sustainability perspectives. Overall, the entry shows that sustainable development is an elastic concept whose meanings and practical implications reflect varied views on the global environmental problems (and opportunities) facing humanity.