bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Subaltern
Authors: Clayton Daniel
Published: March 2017

“Subaltern” has two meanings: first, a person, group, or entity of subordinate status; and, second, a junior army officer. Critical use of the term was pioneered by the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci in relation to interwar fascist Italy, and it has since been used in a more diffuse (and often loose) way, to signal a concern with the most oppressed, disadvantaged, and voiceless sectors of society, and as a code word for non‐Western, colonial, and developing‐world formations of domination and subordination. Following leading subaltern thinkers such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Ranajit Guha, geographers have used the subaltern and the condition it names (subalternity) to raise profound questions about the ability of academia to tackle issues of subordination and to overturn power. The subaltern is a bifurcated figure of both constraint and release – of what power and knowledge can and cannot grasp and control – and has been located both outside (exterior to) and at the margins of (but still inside) fields of power. Subaltern space is a paradoxical space.
Spatial Resolution
Authors: Atkinson Peter M.
Published: March 2017

This entry introduces the term spatial resolution in the context of geographical inquiry and, particularly, the field of remote sensing, where it has become ubiquitous. Attention is then paid to the parameters that define a full sampling framework, including the extent, the support, and what is usually thought of as the sampling design (e.g., the number of observations and the sampling scheme – such as random). The sampling framework determines the set of distances between the observations that constitute the sample and, thus, the spatial resolution afforded by the sampling. The differences between the support (the space over which a measurement or observation is made) and the spatial resolution (the smallest object that can be identified from the data given the sampling strategy) are then elaborated. The second half of the entry deals with the change of support problem, focusing on upscaling (changing to a larger support) and downscaling (changing to a smaller support). Three downscaling cases are described: optimization based on maximizing the spatial correlation between predicted values, optimization based on some prior model, and geostatistical prediction using area‐to‐point kriging. Equations are also given for estimating the sample variance for any support without measurement on that support. The entry closes with some suggestions for future research directions.
Soils in Archaeological Research
Authors: Holliday Vance T.
Published: March 2017

Soils are a potential source of much information in archaeological studies at all scales, from specific archaeological sites to broad regions. Applications of soils in the study of the human past include soil geomorphology, the geoarchaeological principles of site formation processes, and the identification of human impacts. Soil surveys are a useful tool for interpreting landscapes but with the caveat that they were designed for modern planning and land‐use studies. Soils are also an integral component of stratigraphic studies at archaeological sites. The “state factor approach” for understanding soil genesis, developed by Han Jenny and Peter Birkeland, is important in using soils as age indicators of landscapes and stratigraphic units, for reconstructing paleo‐landscapes, and for environmental reconstructions. Soils are also widely used to assess the impacts of past human societies, especially to better understand past agricultural practices and the development of Anthrosols.
Radar Remote Sensing
Authors: Jin Ya‐Qiu
Published: March 2017

Radar is one of most important technologies in airborne and satellite‐borne remote sensing. This entry briefly introduces some advancements of radar technology in remote sensing, such as synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery, fully polarimetric SAR, multistatic (and bistatic) SAR, tomographic (tomo‐) SAR, interferometric SAR (InSAR), inverse SAR (USAR), and radar sounder exploration.
Producer Services: Definition and Classification
Authors: Daniels Peter W.
Published: March 2017

A distinction can be made between services that fulfill final demand and those that provide inputs to intermediate demand. The former are consumer services and the latter are producer services. Some activities serve both intermediate and final demand and are classified as mixed services. Details of a classification of producer services using the International Standard Industrial Classification of All Economic Activities are provided.
Central Place Theory
Authors: Daniels Peter W.
Published: March 2017

Derived from the work of Walter Christaller, central place theory provides a clear and concise method for explaining, as well as planning, the location of centers that comprise a settlement system or are located within a city. Central place theory includes a number of assumptions and key concepts such as
range
and
threshold
, which are used to generate alternative hierarchical distributions of central places, including the marketing (k = 3), transport (k = 4), and administrative (k = 7) principles. While central place theory is a useful tool for analyzing the distribution of settlements, it does have some limitations.
Environment and Health
Authors: Elliott Susan J.
Published: March 2017

The study of links between environment and health involves examination of those aspects of human health influenced by the physical, social, biological, psychosocial, chemical, economic, political, and cultural environments within which we live, work, and play. Examples abound: the disappearance of the Aral Sea, a fourfold increase in asthma since the mid‐1990s, babies dying of contaminated water in the developed world (e.g., in Walkerton, Canada, in 2000), a doubling of the prevalence of peanut allergy, such high demands for energy that we imperil human safety through the proliferation of nuclear power, which leads to the potential for the proliferation of nuclear weapons in unstable nation‐states. This situation is punctuated by the occurrence of major environmental disasters (Love Canal, Bhopal, Chernobyl). Ongoing concerns about creeping environmental disasters (e.g., the potential public health impacts of global climate change) keep environment and health issues on the front pages of newspapers and at the top of research agendas. The complexity of designing studies that answer targeted questions remains a challenge; and, yet, decisions must be made with respect to policy, regulations, and guidelines to be put in place to protect the health of the public.
Transport and Development
Authors: Rodrigue Jean‐Paul
Published: March 2017

Transport is an important factor contributing to development since it is related to job creation, the support of supply chains, and social interactions. Since the Industrial Revolution, the development of transportation has been linked to growing economic opportunities. Transport development favors geographic specialization and competition and provides customers with a wider range of goods and services and access to employment.
Environmental Health
Authors: King Brian
Published: March 2017

Environmental health considers how human health and wellbeing is affected by the natural and physical environment. It attends to the diverse conditions that shape health and considers differences within populations and regions. According to the World Health Organization, most categories of diseases and injuries around the world are influenced by environmental factors. This means that healthy and sustainable environments are needed to reduce morbidity and mortality for human populations. Multiple academic disciplines study environmental health, including environmental epidemiology, toxicology, and exposure science. Scholarship within the discipline of geography has addressed the diverse factors shaping human and environment interactions and how they contribute to the spread of disease and possibilities for health and wellbeing. Particular areas of emphasis have been the spatial production of disease vulnerabilities, impacts of economic development processes, and anticipated effects from climate change. Geographic research on disease and health addresses the multifaceted and multiscalar interactions operating within and across social and ecological systems, in addition to identifying environmental inequities in exposure to toxins and pollutants.
Geography in Higher Education
Authors: Walkington Helen
Published: March 2017

The position of geography in higher education is related to the development of the discipline and role of the state in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This entry reviews the diversity of undergraduate and postgraduate programs and courses of study that have developed from these early efforts and addresses some of the issues that are shaping geography's contemporary role in higher education. Teaching, learning, and assessment are reviewed and key current challenges outlined, including debates on the value and coherence of the discipline. The ongoing tension between teaching and research activities remains a significant challenge. Opportunities being raised by technology and international networking are considered and the frontiers for pedagogic research and development are proposed.
Labor Geographies and the Corporation
Authors: Herod Andrew
Published: March 2017

The structure of corporations has often been understood to result from the investment decisions made by managers. Such a view sees workers in largely passive terms of being simply “factors of production.” However, in the past three decades a group of self‐described labor geographers has demonstrated that workers can forcefully shape corporate organization through their activities. This research community has shown how workers have impacted the structure both of individual corporations and of global production networks containing numerous firms, together with how they have used the state to shape corporate organization legislatively.
Nature and Corporeality
Authors: Evans Bethan
Published: March 2017

This entry draws attention to a tension within work in geography on corporeality relating to nature. This tension stems from the entrance of the body into geography as a result of feminist challenges to hierarchies of knowledge and knowledge production premised on a set of connected dualisms between culture/nature, mind/body, male/female which involved challenging essentialist accounts of the body that explain difference with relation to bodily natures. As such, early work on the body in geography involved challenging essentialist understandings of bodies and, in doing so, emphasizing their social rather than natural construction. Alongside this, work in geography which has questioned the production of nature, particularly that rooted in Marxist traditions within political ecology, has, while problematizing ideas of nature, done much less to question ideas of normative embodiment. However, recent years have seen geographers address corporeal natures and relations between corporeality in multiple ways. This entry focuses on the ways in which geographers have addressed this relationship in two ways: thinking about corporeal natures, and about corporeality in/and nature. In so doing, it highlights emerging work which draws on recent theoretical turns in geography including nonrepresentational theory, and corporeal materialities and hybrid, cyborg, and nonhuman relations across subdisciplinary areas, including political ecology, feminist, health, cultural, and urban geographies.
Oceans and Seas: Human Geography
Authors: Steinberg Philip E.
Published: March 2017

The world's oceans have attracted increasing attention from geographers since the 1990s. Post‐1990 engagements with the sea by human geographers are traced through four waves, each of which has reflected and contributed to emergent foci in human geography. In the first wave of ocean studies, the ocean was used by human geographers to contribute to the understanding of globalization. In the second wave, the ocean was used to understand the role of science, knowledge, and the nonhuman in shaping human society. In the third wave, the focus shifted to the affective nature of encounters between the human and nonhuman. And in the fourth, the ocean is emerging as a key zone for thinking through a world with unstable, voluminous geophysical underpinnings.
Visual Variables
Authors: Roth Robert E.
Published: March 2017

The visual variables describe the graphic dimensions across which a map or other visualization can be varied to encode information. Twelve visual variables are introduced and discussed: (i) location, (ii) size, (iii) shape, (iv) orientation, (v) color hue, (vi) color value, (vii) texture, (viii) color saturation, (ix) arrangement, (x) crispness, (xi) resolution, and (xii) transparency. The perceptual basis of the visual variables is then summarized, which informs use of the visual variables for univariate and bivariate mapping.
Industrial Districts
Authors: Chen Liang‐Chih , Chien Shiuh‐Shen
Published: March 2017

An industrial district (
ID
) is a spatially defined production system characterized by the concentration of firms specializing in certain industrial sectors. In addition to the typical notion of agglomeration economies, the
ID
concept stresses the significance of noneconomic factors, such as culture, norms, and institutions, to account for a region's industrial and economic development. The existence of strong local social networks built on a common culture of trust is regarded as a particularly important and distinctive characteristic of
IDs
.
Political Economy and Regional Development
Authors: MacKinnon Danny
Published: March 2017

Political economy analyzes the economy within its social and political context, and is concerned with not only the exchange of commodities through the market, but also the production and distribution of wealth. In the 1970s and 1980s Marxist political economy became the dominant theoretical approach to regional development, generating a number of landmark contributions such as David Harvey's account of the limits to capital, Neil Smith's theory of uneven development, and Doreen Massey's work on spatial divisions of labor. It was subsequently supplanted by the development of cultural, institutional, and evolutionary perspectives in the 1990s and early 2000s, although it continued to structure work on topics such as labor and scale. Political economy has gained renewed traction in the wake of the recent financial and economic crisis, fostering research into its uneven spatial effects and consequences.
Zoogeography
Authors: DeMers Michael N.
Published: March 2017

Zoogeography is the science whose primary aim is to identify, describe, and explain the distribution of both land and aquatic species of animals. In considering these distributions, the focus is on the causal relationships between the animals and possible ecological, climatic, and anthropogenic factors. A major difference between zoogeography and biogeography is the focus on biological organisms that have the capability to move relatively quickly in response to these changing conditions. Alfred Russel Wallace, the father of zoogeography, was responsible for the first major theoretical contributions, that of the regionalization of faunal assemblages – a topic still being examined today. Other major contributions of zoogeography include contributions to the theory of evolution, affirmation of continental drift, development of areography and area analysis, dynamic zoogeography and species migration concepts, metapopulation dynamics, hierarchy theory, a theory of experimental zoogeography and island biogeography, the concept of species–area curves, and macroecology, which focuses on the cause and effect relationships between plant and animal distributions and their environments. Over the years the term “zoogeography” has faded from use in favor of the more general term “biogeography,” or the newer “macroecology,” but the science continues regardless of the name.
Transcripts: Coding and Analysis
Authors: Cope Meghan
Published: March 2017

Transcription is a method of turning audio and other materials (such as historical hand‐written documents) into digital text. The process involves both technical and decision‐making challenges that are reviewed here. The resulting transcripts can be productively coded and analyzed to generate new insights and geographic knowledge; a range of approaches to coding and analyzing is reviewed with relative benefits and risks discussed.
Transport Geography
Authors: Rodrigue Jean‐Paul
Published: March 2017

Transport geography is a subdiscipline of geography that is concerned with the mobility of freight, people, and information. It seeks to understand the spatial organization of mobility by considering its attributes and constraints as they relate to the origin, destination, extent, nature, and purpose of movements. This entry reviews the main principles of transport geography, how relevant transportation is at different scales and how transport geography has emerged to address contemporary challenges in the mobility of passengers, freight, and information.
Poverty
Authors: Yapa Lakshman
Published: March 2017

Poverty can be viewed within two frameworks: through exchange‐value and through use‐value. In the exchange‐value framework, poverty means not having enough money to buy a family's basic needs in food, health, housing, energy, transport, and education, a view held by the general public, the academy, and institutions such as the World Bank and the US Census. The solution, then, is to find ways to increase family income through employment in the formal economy. It is possible that this very view of poverty as a lack of money or exchange‐value is responsible for poverty's stubborn persistence. The other approach to poverty is a solution through the use‐value framework: instead of asking why poor people do not have more money, this approach asks why the poor don't have access to basic goods and services. This is an important distinction, as the two views lead to very different outcomes – in discourse, policy options, agency, and the likelihood of ultimate success.
Positionality
Authors: England Kim
Published: March 2017

Positionality initially emerged from critiques of omniscient, unmarked researchers producing supposedly value‐free, impartial research. Beginning from the premise that knowledge is partial, situated, and power‐laden, positionality highlights how people, including researchers, are differently positioned in hierarchies of power and privilege and thus come to know and interpret the world from different social locations. The researcher's positionality shapes their research, inhibiting or enabling certain research insights, and mediates the research process, including relations with the people, places, and materials of the research project. Positionality is also a relational concept: the researched are knowledgeable agents and as such they and the researcher both structure the research encounter and construct “the data.” Positionality has been refined and adapted over time. The theoretical, conceptual, and empirical interventions around intersectionality and embodiment have been especially significant.
Agri‐Food Multinational Enterprises
Authors: Rama Ruth
Published: March 2017

The agroindustrial sector is composed of segments such as agriculture, food, beverage and tobacco processing, research and development (R&D), and retailing. Although agroindustries are dominated by small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) worldwide, multinational enterprises (MNEs) play an important role in these substantial industries. There has been a major transformation of the geographic pattern of agricultural foreign direct investment (FDI), with a large share now consisting of South–South investment. Agricultural FDI involves important aspects such as land grabbing, contract farming, and the emergence of global value chains controlled by companies based in the South. FDI in food and beverage processing is mainly a North–North phenomenon. Companies tend to internationalize their R&D activities. Large food retailing corporations have also tended to internationalize.
Space
Authors: Thrift Nigel
Published: March 2017

There are many shades and intensities of space, beginning with the most obvious: how we know where we are, transiting to how we experience space as a sensory realm: how we feel where we are. The where and the how are being transformed as we move into a period in which our infrastructures are being inscribed on the planet as a new era, known as the Anthropocene. Space is stabilized and parceled out as though it were ours to own by the forces of the state and the economy.
Water Conflicts
Authors: Petersen‐Perlman Jacob D. , Wolf Aaron T.
Published: March 2017

The transboundary nature of water may lead to conflicts regarding its use. Yet, entities, both national and international, are more likely to cooperate over water than to engage in conflict. While the risk of water conflict may be exacerbated by several factors, institutional capacity, in the form of treaties or river basin organizations, has been found to both prevent water conflict and enhance water cooperation.
Mobility Gaps
Authors: Wenglenski Sandrine
Published: March 2017

“Mobility gaps” address the core issue of whether every individual has adequate access to mobility to be able to satisfy the needs of their everyday life. The question has become particularly relevant as mobility has become fundamental to performing day‐to‐day activities. There are differences in the capacity to travel and in travel behaviors which are contingent on many factors including individual and environmental ones. Yet, individual mobility does not only result from constraints. It stems from tradeoffs involving the burden of constraints, the legacy of cultural and personal experiences, and the pursuit of personal goals. Since daily mobility contains some degree of choice, assessing the issue of mobility gaps and equity in transport is complex.
Animal Geographies
Authors: Buller Henry
Published: March 2017

Too much geographical explanation has simply ignored the impact of nonhumans on the geography of humans. It has also failed to acknowledge the multitude of ways in which humans, in their sociospatial practices, impact on animals. Animal geography offers, on the one hand, a concern with how we use animals to define us (and our spaces) by their difference and, on the other, a more radical attention to ways in which those differences actually matter little as animals, like us, become correlational partners in spatial practice.
Water and Climate Change
Authors: Chang Heejun
Published: March 2017

Water plays a central role in sustaining human lives and ecosystems. As climate change is likely to increase both temperature and precipitation variability, the spatial and temporal distribution of freshwater availability will shift on Earth. Additionally, as the intensity of the water cycle increases in a warming world, extreme hydroclimatic events will become more frequent over space and time. Floods and droughts will have huge socioeconomic and environmental impacts. Future climate adaptation strategies in the water sector should include both structural and nonstructural measures across different water management entities across scales.
Anthropogeography
Authors: Peake Linda J.
Published: March 2017

Anthropogeography refers to a mode of systematic analysis, adopted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, of the geographical distribution of societies, the relationship between migration and the physical environment, and the influence of environments upon people. Developed by the German geographer Ratzel, it is an approach that is now rarely mentioned given its association with environmental determinism, social Darwinism, and its usage by the Third Reich to justify their expansionism. It is, however, increasingly recognized that Ratzel's work led to the founding of geography as a discipline in which both social and physical phenomena were subject to systematic study.
Geotargeting Protocol Standards
Authors: Chou Tien‐Yin , Huang Yi‐Min , Lin Wei‐Yen , Lin Feng‐Cheng , Hao Chen‐Yu
Published: March 2017

Geotargeting protocols are required for transmitting location‐based information from sensors, the Global Positioning System, and mobile devices that can provide their own location coordinates. Popular geotargeting protocol standards are GeoSMS, WaterML, and Sensor Web Enablement. These protocol standards have been applied in various applications, including disaster responses, taxi booking services, water resource management, and debris flow monitoring systems.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)
Authors: Li Mengxiang , Tang Liang
Published: March 2017

An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is a flying object without a human pilot onboard. It has a long tradition in military and today finds more and more civilian and commercial applications. A brief review of its history is given. After defining terminology and classification in general, emphasis is put on the applications in surveying and mapping, photogrammetry, remote sensing, and geographic information systems (GIS).
Tropical Savanna Ecosystems
Authors: Kanniah Kasturi Devi , Beringer Jason
Published: March 2017

The structure, composition, and distribution of savannas are largely controlled by water and nutrient availability, radiation, and temperature, which are then modified by disturbance (mainly fire) and longer‐term climate change. Changes in these environmental factors can modify the carbon balance of savanna ecosystems. Modeling studies have shown that future increases in CO
2
concentration, air temperature, and mean annual precipitation could potentially increase both tree and grass biomass by 18.6 and 0.7 tC ha
−1
year
−1
, respectively. CO
2
was found to be the main driver of increasing tree biomass whereas grass biomass increase was due to increased temperature. Changes in the seasonality of precipitation affected the growing season of both tree and grass biomass. Changing fire regimes via the reduction of fire frequency increased the tree biomass. Understanding the environmental drivers responsible for the patterns and processes of savannas is critical in predicting the impacts of future climate change on savanna distribution and carbon storage.
Biologic Dating Techniques
Authors: Cánovas Juan Antonio Ballesteros , Stoffel Markus
Published: March 2017

Absolute dating procedures generally focus on achieving a better understanding of geomorphic processes. More specifically, biological proxies such as tree rings, lichens, and/or corals represent valuable paleorecorders of environmental changes and can be used to date past geomorphic activity in various geographic contexts. Biological dating procedures therefore allow the reconstruction, quantification, and interpretation of geomorphic processes with high precision. In particular, tree rings have been used profusely to track different geomorphic processes with up to seasonal resolution. Lichenometry and coral dating have been employed as well, yet less often, although their sensitivity to ecological changes and representation in different environments makes them highly valuable recorders of environmental changes. In this entry, the scientific bases of dendrogeomorphology, lichenometry, and coral dating are reviewed and summarized. Several case studies are presented and the utility and applicability of the approaches discussed.
Dendrogeomorphology
Authors: Stoffel Markus , Ballesteros Cánovas Juan Antonio , Corona Christophe , Trappmann Daniel G.
Published: March 2017

Dendrogeomorphology is the science of using growth anomalies in tree‐ring records to infer past geomorphic activity. Tree rings have been demonstrated to be a very useful and reliable archive of past process dynamics and changes thereof because they preserve evidence of past geomorphic activity and provide critical information on the dating of past events with annual or subannual resolution. This entry documents recent progress in the research field of dendrogeomorphology and illustrates approaches and techniques which are commonly used.
Citizenship
Authors: Staeheli Lynn A.
Published: March 2017

Citizenship is most commonly defined as a legal standing that connotes membership in a national polity, the guarantee of rights, and consent to obligations associated with membership. Layered onto this definition are other meanings that address substantive aspects of citizenship, commonly described in terms of an individual's public standing in a political community. These different definitions reflect competing theoretical and normative perspectives on citizenship and citizenship's spatiality. Such perspectives are codified in laws and relationships that affect the ways in which individuals become recognized as citizens, the processes of citizenship formation, and the relationships between citizenship and democracy.
Spatialization
Authors: Fabrikant Sara Irina
Published: March 2017

Depicting information collections in map‐like displays, even if the collections are not themselves explicitly spatial, is an information visualization technique known as
spatialization
. Spatialization exploits the power of metaphors in graphic displays as cognitive aids, facilitating information seekers to sift more efficiently through, and gain knowledge from, vast amounts of accumulated data, such as medical records, banking transactions, or information‐bearing items archived in online collections. Spatialization has emerged as a scientific research field within GIScience since the early 1990s, inspired by advances in computer graphics, human–computer interaction, and visualization research developing mostly outside of geography. Spatialization involves a systematic transformation of high‐dimensional datasets into lower‐dimensional, visuospatial representations by means of spatial metaphors. This is typically performed in a two‐step process: (i) a computational transformation to rearrange data items based on their content and functional relationships into a logically defined coordinate system; and (ii) the graphic depiction of the spatialized data to facilitate information exploration and knowledge construction.
Transport Policy
Authors: Goetz Andrew R. , Perl Anthony D.
Published: March 2017

Transport policy can be defined as a set of constructs and propositions established to achieve objectives related to the functioning and performance of a transport system. While the provision of transport and the development of transport policy involve both the public and private sectors, it is typically governments (at all levels) that establish and coordinate transport policies for their jurisdictions. Transport systems are vital to societal and economic development, and, because of the scale, speed, and complexity of contemporary transport, transport policies related to economic competitiveness, technology, environmental impacts, safety, and security have become increasingly important. Starting in the late 1970s, transport policies worldwide have emphasized more private sector participation through deregulation, liberalization, and privatization initiatives in the airline, maritime, railroad, and trucking industries, as well as in infrastructure provision. Because transport is a major consumer of petroleum and a contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions, transport policy since the 1990s has become more focused on sustainability. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, have focused greater attention on transport security policies.
Firm Migration
Authors: van Dijk Jouke , Pellenbarg Piet H.
Published: March 2017

Firm migration is a very important determinant of regional economic dynamics. This entry gives an overview of the present state of the theories and empirical findings on this topic. The spatial scale is important, because the causes and effects differ substantially for firm relocations within urban areas and between regions within countries, and for international relocations between countries or even continents. Firm migration research started in the 1950s and 1960s by studying the relocation of manufacturing firms in the context of regional development policies. Early on firm‐external factors were the main explanatory factors, but later on the role of firm‐internal factors and the phases in the decision‐making process became more important as better data and methods were available.
Qualitative Information: Representation
Authors: Burgess Stephen
Published: March 2017

Information representation
is a term that is not commonly found across the qualitative geographical methods literature. It is mostly used in geographic information systems (GIS) and the related field of geovisualization. These share practices and literatures with visualization as it has emerged in the natural sciences and computer sciences and have been identified as quantitative practices embedded in positivism. This entry examines how the juxtaposition of
information representation
with the term
qualitative
is indicative of mixed‐methods projects that have emerged around GIS and geovisualization since the 1990s. However, while information representation may not be a term common to qualitative geography, issues of
representation
are themselves important and are also considered here, giving a wider context for some of the changes which have brought the qualitative to information representation.
Soils of the
U
nited
S
tates
Authors: Drohan Patrick J.
Published: March 2017

Soil diversity in the United States reflects a vast array of parent materials and topography, as modified and affected by changing climate and organisms through time. Although complex in origin, US soils have been classified, mapped in detail, and interpreted for their suitability and limitations for land uses. This Herculean task was accomplished by the US Soil Survey via a hierarchical taxonomic system used to classify soils known as Soil Taxonomy. At the highest taxonomic level are the 12 soil orders. Mollisols are the most widespread soil order in the conterminous United States; Gelisols are most common in Alaska; and Andisols are most common in Hawai'i. The prevalence of Mollisols across the central part of the United States, in addition to a favorable plant growth climate, is responsible for the largest and most productive agricultural system in the history of civilization. The greatest challenge currently facing US soils is human misuse of soil. Although the Soil Survey helped correct past human behaviors that were unsustainable, ending decades of poor soil management, the future security of US soils will depend on aggressive education and research on soil management in the face of an ever‐growing human population.
Island Biogeography
Authors: Gillespie Rosemary G.
Published: March 2017

The biogeography of islands has captured the attention of naturalists for centuries. After providing the backdrop for the development of key concepts in evolution, the isolated nature of islands has allowed them to be used as discrete entities for the development of some foundational concepts in both evolution and ecology. Associated with their use in conceptual advances in the field is the recognition that, from a biological perspective, islands cover a diverse array of systems, from lakes to discrete habitat patches, that differ primarily in the degree of isolation they provide, the matric providing the isolation, and the kinds of organisms that are isolated by the matrix. The entry highlights attributes of organisms associated with such insular systems, and processes that occur in insular systems of varying degrees of isolation. It concludes by considering current factors that are affecting islands, and implications for the conservation of insular biotas.
Ground‐Based Radar
Authors: Jiang Liming
Published: March 2017

Ground‐based radar defined in this entry specifically refers to a ground‐based synthetic aperture radar (GBSAR). It is an effective remote sensing tool to measure topography and deformation of natural and artificial surfaces by using interferometric techniques. GBSAR interferometry has several unique advantages over other terrestrial remote sensing techniques, highlighted by (i) high acquisition frequency of a few minutes, (ii) large monitoring extent up to a few square kilometers, (iii) high measurement accuracy (metric level for DEM generation and submillimeter level for deformation monitoring), and (iv) independent of almost any weather and light conditions. In the last decade, more than ten GBSAR systems have been developed with different radar types and scanning models. These GBSAR systems have been widely used in various environmental and geological applications, mainly including early monitoring warning of slope stability and landslide, monitoring of human‐made structure deformation, mapping of glacier dynamics, and snow depth.
Information Synthesis
Authors: Sui Daniel
Published: March 2017

Information synthesis generally refers to the process of integrating, or weaving together, information from disparate sources into a coherent whole. Information synthesis can be achieved through taxonomy and classification, concepts/models/theories, analogies/metaphors/narratives/stories, and/or powerful images or embodiment without words. With information increasingly becoming digital in the age of big data, a variety of software tools have been developed to facilitate information synthesis, but synthesis is a creative process that cannot be completely automated. Manual labor is still involved in the process of synthesis, which typically includes: (i) goal or purpose setting; (ii) gathering relevant information and assessing the validity of information; (iii) selecting synthesis strategy/method; (iv) presenting results and obtaining feedback. Information synthesis can be qualitative and quantitative or a combination of both; synthesis could take place across different data formats, different spatiotemporal scales, different problem domains or disciplines, and difference senses. Like spatial analysis, information synthesis is an integral part of geographical scholarship that transcends subdisciplinary specializations. Analysis and synthesis are two inseparable aspects of a holistic geographic methodology. Meaningful synthesis is built upon the results of preceding analysis, and meticulous analysis makes more sense only when a subsequent synthesis is achieved. Successful geographic research rests upon an artful blend and hybridization of analysis and synthesis.
Pedoturbation
Authors: Fey Martin V. , Schaetzl Randall J.
Published: March 2017

The natural processes that mix soil are commonly referred to as pedoturbation. Major processes include digging by animals, uprooting of trees, swelling of clay, and downslope movement under gravity. The effects can be immediately manifested or imperceptibly slow. They may promote or retard the differentiation of the soil profile into horizons, and modify soil porosity. Less obvious processes of pedoturbation include the movement of air and water, freezing and thawing, growth of salt crystals, and meteoric impacts. Human activities are also a form of pedoturbation, disturbing the soil, as in agriculture, mining, and construction. The well‐mixed, uppermost part of most soils may be thought of as a biomantle, the lower boundary of which is sometimes marked by a stone line bearing archaeological secrets. The structure and porosity of the biomantle, critical to soil quality, is maintained to a large extent by faunal activity and partly substituted in agriculture by conventional tillage. According to this paradigm, soil management ought to become more cognizant than it has been of the refreshing, rejuvenating, and pedogenic effects of natural pedoturbation.
Heteronormativity
Authors: Peake Linda J.
Published: March 2017

Heteronormativity, the ubiquitously held belief that heterosexuality is natural, and thus normal, is a useful concept for investigating embodied sociospatial configurations of gender, sex, and sexuality. It has been introduced into the study of geography by both feminist and queer geographers who have shown how space becomes heterosexualized (or not) through analyses of gendered, racialized, and sexualized practices, encounters, and relations in specific sites and locales. Over time, geographers of sexuality and space have moved from their initial exploration of those identities that fall outside of heteronormativity, such as those of gays and lesbians and those designated queer, to exploring the range of desires and bodies that are considered heteronormative. Since the mid‐1990s, research on heternormativity has most commonly taken place in social and cultural geography, although it has implications for all subfields of human geography.
Water Conservation
Authors: Chang Heejun
Published: March 2017

Water conservation is becoming an important global issue as water demand increases but water supply is likely to diminish owing to population growth and climate change. Water conservation in the urban residential sector is highly related to land use and development density, as well as other socioeconomic and behavioral characteristics of residents. Water conservation in the industrial sector has been the most successful partially because of financial incentives to reduce wastewater. Water conservation in the agricultural sector has been slow and has much room for improvement to save water through educational, economic, and policy incentives. Water conservation at one scale may not necessarily save water at another scale.
Urban Ecology
Authors: Douglas Ian
Published: March 2017

Firmly rooted in ecology, urban ecology is the study of urban areas as a series of habitats for human beings and other organisms. It is cross‐disciplinary and may be divided into four key themes: ecology and urban public health, ecology in cities, ecology of cities, and ecology for cities. Urban ecology has diverse roots in social‐spatial analysis, landscape and urban planning, the colonization of urban areas by fauna and flora, and integrated studies of complex socioecological systems. Urban habitats are affected by Anthropocene environmental change, especially anthropogenic soils and substrates. Debates center around the nature of the rural to urban transition, the impact of cultural and social preferences on the character of urban ecosystems, the valuation of urban ecosystem services, ways of developing holistic appraisals of climate change on biota, and social justice in terms of the relative gains from ecosystem services and disservices in cities in different parts of the world.
Geographic Information Science
Authors: Duckham Matt
Published: March 2017

Geographic information science (GIScience) refers to the scientific study of geographic information, its creation, characteristics, structure, analysis, and transformations, as well as the community of experts that specialize in those topics. However, a deeper understanding of GIScience requires an understanding of three complementary perspectives: the development of GIScience; the distinct styles of inquiry and knowledge creation used in GIScience; and the shared expertise common to those connected with the field.
Participatory Action Research
Authors: Masuda Jeffrey R.
Published: March 2017

Since the 1970s, participatory action research (PAR) has grown from relative obscurity on the radical fringes of geography to become a central research paradigm adopted by researchers of all disciplinary stripes who share a common interest in improving the relevance and impact of their work in the world. Particularly adept at uncovering the root causes of social and spatial inequalities, researchers using PAR have brought research into the communities in which they work, and have simultaneously opened up elitist and exclusionary research institutions and practices to broader audiences and practitioners. PAR has come to represent a wide spectrum of political philosophies, methodologies, and dissemination practices that place emancipation, equity, and social justice front and center in the practice and objectives of research. Using numerous inspirations from critical social theory, and embracing methodological plurality and creativity, practitioners take on many forms of political oppression and social marginalization as they are encountered in the world.
Democracy
Authors: Barnett Clive , Low Murray
Published: March 2017

Democracy means “rule by the people.” The delimitation of “the people” and of “rule” is geographically complex. Democracy has only recently attracted explicit attention as an object of geographical research. Research on liberal‐representative democracy includes electoral geography's sustained attention to the spatial mechanics of democratic politics and work on the global diffusion of liberal‐representative norms. Research on alternative democratic spaces emphasizes democracy's inclusive, participatory, and contestatory qualities, and deliberative and poststructuralist traditions of radical democracy have also been important. These face the problem of whether the forms of influence located in various practices of opinion and identity formation can, and should, be articulated with practices of rule. Work on radical democracies has focused on urban and transnational scales. Work on the latter raises important questions about the ineluctability of representation in democratic politics, and also suggests the importance of combining territorial and scalar concepts with nonterritorial and nonscalar spatialities.
Hydrologic Cycle
Authors: Oki Taikan , Kim Hyungjun
Published: March 2017

An overview of global hydrological cycles is introduced. The roles of storages and flows under the context of global hydrological cycles and Earth system science, and interactions among them, are discussed; estimated volumes and fluxes are illustrated quantitatively. Terrestrial, atmospheric, and combined water balance concepts are described and applications of them are presented. Empirical relationships of energy and water balances are explained. Current situations of the modeling, the research opportunities, and the gaps in global hydrology are also articulated, shown, and identified.
Transport Technology
Authors: Perl Anthony D. , Goetz Andrew R.
Published: March 2017

Transport technology has evolved over time to increase dramatically the speed, scale, and ambition of human movement across and beyond the earth. This overview traces the historical development of propulsion that enabled mobility to attain successively remote frontiers. It then considers the design of increasingly comfortable and secure vehicles over time, followed by a review of experience in building increasingly complex infrastructure. A brief discussion of contemporary advances in transport technology across these three dimensions concludes this overview.
Environment and Migration
Authors: Felli Romain
Published: March 2017

Since the mid‐1980s environmental degradation has increasingly been seen as one cause of human migration. More recently, anthropogenic climate change has also been understood as a driver of migration. The forecasts, made by some environmentalists, of millions of so‐called environmental refugees have been widely repeated in policymaking circles and in the media. Although these predictions have been criticized by geographers and other social scientists for their crude environmental determinism, they have durably shaped the debate on environment and migration and led to many policy proposals. Subsequent work has insisted on the rather more complex and multicausal nature of migration and on the fact that migration should also be understood as a strategy of adaptation to environmental change rather than as a failure of it. Research on this topic has grown exponentially since the mid‐2000s or so, and ranges from questions of methods to case studies and critical discourse analyses.