bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Situationists/Situationist Geography
Authors: Bonnett Alastair
Published: March 2017

The situationists were a Marxist inspired avant‐garde activist group that sought to re‐invent revolutionary theory for a late modern consumer society. To this end they developed the concept of “the society of the spectacle.” They also claimed that political praxis should take place at the level of everyday life and everyday space, a claim that led them to develop “psychogeography.”
Phenology
Authors: Schwartz Mark D.
Published: March 2017

Phenology refers to the scientific study of recurring plant and animal life cycle stages, especially their timing and relationships with weather and climate. Examples would include the opening of leaf buds on a shrub, the beginning of autumn leaf color on a tree, or the first appearance of a migratory bird species in spring. The timings of many of these phenomena can be quite sensitive to small changes in environmental conditions, such as air or soil temperature. Thus, practical applications of phenological information are likely older than human history itself, yet emergence of phenology as a science has been relatively recent. The rigorous and systematic observation, recording, and analysis of these data, especially when integrated among various sources and collected at multiple sites and scales, provide for a wide variety of important applications including in agriculture and horticulture, global climate change, and education.
Monitoring and Evaluation
Authors: Gaskin‐Reyes Camille
Published: March 2017

Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) methodologies are integral parts of the analysis of the performance of organizations and the design and implementation phases of plans and projects in many fields. Monitoring can be defined as a systematic procedure for checking for the effectiveness (outcomes and impacts) and the efficiency (outputs) of interventions during implementation. The main purpose is to identify the progress and shortcomings and to recommend corrective measures to optimize desired results. Performance indicators are a key aspect of monitoring. Monitoring and evaluation delivers valuable lessons to improve future planning and budgeting, and to demonstrate outcomes. Tangible evidence on outcomes reduces subjectivity, and makes it easier for managers to distinguish failure from success.
Residential Mobility
Authors: Li Si‐ming
Published: March 2017

Residential mobility, or intra‐urban migration, is often understood as the major means for an individual or household to adjust housing consumption to changing needs and circumstances, and is closely tied to advancement along the housing career. The notion of life course, which emphasizes the interrelationship between housing, education, employment, and other parallel careers, has recently replaced that of family life cycle as the guiding theoretical as well as methodological approach in the study of residential moves. Beyond the level of the individual and household, residential mobility, including the lack of it, has major implications for neighborhood stability and change, and for urban spatial restructuring, including the likelihood of spatial mismatch at the metropolitan level.
Industrial Complex
Authors: Chen Ke
Published: March 2017

Walter Isard defined an industrial complex as a combination of industrial activities occurring at a given location that are subject to important production, marketing, or other interrelations. Industrial complexes are characterized by trading links between firms that govern their locational behavior. Individual firms locating in an industrial complex may reduce transaction costs within the particular input–output production network. Similar ideas to industrial complex are industrial districts and industrial clusters.
Climate Adaptation/Mitigation
Authors: McBean Gordon A.
Published: March 2017

The climate is changing due to humans' actions, and humans need to respond through mitigation – emission reductions – to reduce the rate of change and through adaptation to reduce the impacts and gain the benefits. The Climate Convention provides an international framework for both mitigation and adaptation but countries need to develop and implement national strategies on the basis of scientific‐technological and socioeconomic information and analyses, and their national to local capabilities.
Corporations and the Law
Authors: Barkan Joshua E.
Published: March 2017

Geographic research on corporations has examined the ways companies organize the production and distribution of goods across capitalist economies. Legal rulings and regulations are integral to this process, yet the geographic study of corporations and the law remains in its infancy. This entry covers the history of corporations and the law, with particular attention to the role of geography in legal definitions of the corporation. It concludes with contemporary geographic issues involving law and corporations, particularly under corporate‐led economic globalization, and indicates areas for future research on non‐Western legal systems and the role of legal politics in shaping corporate economies.
Underclass Theories
Authors: Gardener Bradley S.
Published: March 2017

Underclass theories attempt to identify, locate, and analyze the poorest people in society. Social scientists and journalists have traditionally used the term “underclass” to describe concentrations of impoverished racialized populations living in urban areas. This type of poverty is cyclical, and takes place in the absence of social mobility. Scholarly views on the underclass fall into two categories. The structural school of thought frames the underclass as victims of economic changes caused by globalization, while the behavioral school blames poverty on the poor themselves, focusing on antisocial behaviors and flawed cultural ideas and practices. In the mid‐ to late twentieth century behavioral variations of underclass theories have been very influential in US and UK policy circles, facilitating what is commonly referred to as the retrenchment of the welfare state.
Paleofloods
Authors: Baker Victor R.
Published: March 2017

Paleofloods are past or ancient floods that are indicated by means of natural recording processes. The scientific discipline of paleoflood hydrology combines geological and hydrological approaches. Slackwater deposit–paleostage indicator (SWD–PSI) paleoflood hydrology employs recent technological advances in geochronology and hydraulic flow modeling to reconstruct the magnitudes and frequencies of paleofloods from evidence of their paleostages. The very real information on the rarest and most extreme floods discovered through paleoflood studies offers a preferable alternative to conventional flood‐frequency analyses both for estimating the risks posed by such flood phenomena and for communicating those risks to the general public.
Environmentality and Green Governmentality
Authors: Rutherford Stephanie
Published: March 2017

Environmentality, or green governmentality, offers a way of thinking about how power works through the construction of the environment, its problems, and the solution to those problems. The concept emerged in the 1990s and has been applied to a wide array of environmental questions. Environmentality is most keenly focused on how regimes of truth are made, how strategies of regulation are formed, and how human subjectivities are enacted with reference to the environment.
Transaction Cost
Authors: Pan Fenghua
Published: March 2017

Transaction costs are costs associated with effecting an economic transaction, either through market exchange between two or more legally distinct economic actors, or internally within a single organization. The idea of transaction costs was proposed by Coase in 1937, and followed up by Williamson and other scholars. As a result, transaction cost economics was established. Though derived from economics, transaction costs have also been widely used in economic geography studies. The concept is used to analyze industry agglomeration, industrial clusters, the development of cities and regions, and other related issues.
Synthetic Aperture Radar
Authors: Frey Othmar
Published: March 2017

In this entry, the basic principles of synthetic aperture radar imaging are introduced from a general physics perspective instead of tackling the topic from the more widespread signal processing point of view. Thus, the material is thought to be accessible to any scientist or the general reader with some basic knowledge of physics and calculus. The focus is on explaining theimaging concept of synthetic aperture radar. Most of the applications based on remote sensing with synthetic aperture radar systems make use of advanced technologies that have been built on top of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. Such technologies include: SAR interferometry, differential SAR interferometry, persistent scatterer interferometry, and more recently, SAR polarimetric interferometry, and SAR tomography. A plethora of applications are supported – or, partly, were made available only – by these SAR‐based techniques. Examples of such applications include: topographic mapping, change detection, land cover classification, ground deformation/subsidence monitoring, measurement of co‐seismic displacements, crustal deformation and volcano monitoring, remote sensing of the cryosphere, remote sensing of the biosphere, quantification of carbon sequestration, and, in general, monitoring tasks requiring day/night, all‐weather availability.
Geomorphic Thresholds
Authors: Church Michael
Published: March 2017

Thresholds of the first kind refer to boundaries or discontinuities in space or time; thresholds of the second kind denote a transformation of state or intensity associated with an ongoing process. Threshold crossings may be forced by processes working within a system (intrinsic thresholds) or by a change in some extrinsic control (extrinsic threshold). Thresholds may also be classified according to whether they are abrupt (sharp), transitional, or associated with rate discontinuities. Threshold crossings may be simple, when the new state is immediately assumed, or complex, when the system approaches the new state by some nondirect path. Finally, thresholds may be considered according to whether a reverse crossing may restore the system to its previous state (transitive) or not (intransitive).
Necrogeography
Authors: Muzaini Hamzah
Published: March 2017

Necrogeography, or the study of “deathscapes,” is the inquiry into spaces associated with death, dying, and the dead. This entry discusses the key strands of research that define this subfield, and some of the emerging themes.
Density Estimation
Authors: Ren Fang
Published: March 2017

Density estimation seeks to construct a probability density function from a sample. Given its power in data visualization and exploration, density estimation methods have been widely used in many research fields that involve spatially referenced data, such as medical geography, criminology, ecology, and traffic analysis. By converting a set of discrete geographic events or features into a continuous field, density estimation helps identify the spatial patterns embedded in data and circumvents the analytical challenges raised by aggregation.
Indigenous Knowledge
Authors: Barker David
Published: March 2017

Indigenous knowledge (IK) is the dynamic and complex body of know‐how, practices, and skills developed and sustained by peoples and communities with shared histories and experiences. It is community‐based, culture‐specific, and location‐specific. It is impressive in content and practical in application, and critical to successful livelihood strategies. Its utility has been extensively documented and researched among small‐scale farming communities in the tropics in relation to land management. IK has important potential roles in development planning and in mitigating the vulnerability of local communities to climate change. Successful realization of these roles raises problematic issues, such as unresolved tensions between scientific knowledge and local knowledge.
Unemployment and “Underclass”
Authors: Samers Michael
Published: March 2017

While unemployment seems to have climbed the political agenda of wealthier countries since the economic and financial crisis of 2008, periodic crises and high levels of unemployment have plagued poorer countries since at least the late 1980s, and the same might be said for many Western European countries as well. There are significant differences between the methodological approaches, spatial emphasis, and explanations offered by economists and noneconomists (including geographers) for unemployment. This is especially the case concerning the analysis of unemployment in poorer countries. Furthermore, noneconomist scholars working in poorer countries over the last 20 years seem to focus far more on gender expectations and women's (un‐)employment as well as “youth unemployment.” Yet, increases in youth unemployment in the wealthier countries since 2008, together with growing inequality, have led to debates about the continual presence of an “underclass,” now often referred to as “the precariat.”
Comparative Advantage
Authors: Yeung Godfrey
Published: March 2017

Comparative advantage is the capacity of an agent, a region, or a country to produce a specific commodity or provide a service at a lower opportunity cost over another agent, region, or country. It is one of the fundamental concepts in international economics and is normally used to support free trade and pertinent policy agendas in the Washington Consensus. Heterodox economists and neo‐Marxist social scientists, however, argue that empirical evidence illustrates the restrictive assumptions of such free‐trade theories, and neo‐Marxists geographers have typically highlighted the fictitious nature of capital in the debates.
Environment and Disease
Authors: Tamerius James D.
Published: March 2017

Environmental factors and systems mediate exposures to various physical, chemical, and biological factors that cause disease. Indeed, the environment has a significant role in many major disease systems worldwide, such as lower respiratory diseases, diarrheal diseases, and vector‐borne disease. Environmental variability is one of many factors that can affect the spatial and temporal distribution of disease. However, the relationships between the environment and disease are strongly modulated by social, political, and economic factors. Understanding the role of the environment in disease is critical for mitigating the burden of disease.
Ecogeography/Macroecology (Range and Body Size)
Authors: Jarzyna Marta A. , Maurer Brian A.
Published: March 2017

Macroecology is a statistical investigation of large‐scale patterns of species diversity in order to elucidate mechanisms controlling the structure and dynamics of biotas. Though the term “macroecology” was first used in the late 1980s, its foundations were laid much earlier through fields such as biogeography, ecology, and macroevolutionary biology. Some of the most general and best‐researched patterns in macroecology include species–area relationships, latitudinal diversity gradients, range size and abundance relationships, and patterns in the distribution of body size among species. These macroecological patterns arise from a combination of the evolutionary mechanisms, species demographic characteristics, and the variation in environmental conditions. However, the complex nature of the interaction between these processes creates conceptual challenges for universal explanations of specific biodiversity patterns.
Domestic Spaces
Authors: Cieraad Irene
Published: March 2017

Domestic space in the singular has become a generic term for the private space of the house, the household, or the home as opposed to the public space of the street or the urban space of the city as a whole. Yet, the domestic space concept has only a short scholarly history, especially in its opposition to public space. In the late 1970s the duality of domestic versus public space was criticized by feminist scholars for the patriarchal dominance of the public, male domain of the street over the secluded female domain of the house. This gendered opposition also paralleled an important economic schism in industrial, or so‐called capitalist, societies of the unpaid domestic labor of women versus the wage labor of male breadwinners performed outside the domestic domain. The terminology of domestic spaces in the plural is even more recent and implicitly criticizes the bipolarity of the domestic/public opposition. As such, the plural acknowledges not only the internal zoning of domestic space according to usage, age, and gender, but also a more gradual transition of public and private spaces in modern domestic architecture.
Therapeutic Landscapes
Authors: Williams Allison M.
Published: March 2017

The concept of therapeutic landscape is recognized as one of the key contributions that geographers have made to the study of health. It is an essentially metaphorical concept that continues to evolve, with innovative applications, to better understand the characteristics of place that contribute to the processes at play in the making of healing places and symbolic landscapes, and in the marketing of such places.
Surplus Labor
Authors: Cornwell Janelle
Published: March 2017

Surplus labor is a concept developed by Karl Marx in the nineteenth century to describe the production of surplus value and profit. It refers to the labor that produces a value beyond that which is needed for the subsistence of the worker or workers who perform it. Workers in all kinds of societies perform surplus labor under a variety of economic conditions. The relationship between surplus labor and its management, ownership, and extraction can be used to define the character of an economic process as capitalist, feudal, slave, communal, or other form. Political economists, geographers, and others have used surplus labor accounting as a device to measure the rate of exploitation in an enterprise and to better understand the character of economic relationships in particular and broad contexts.
Dendroclimatology
Authors: Grissino‐Mayer Henri D.
Published: March 2017

Dendroclimatology is the use of tree rings that have been absolutely dated to their exact years of formation to better understand the Earth's past, present, and future climate. The field requires basic investigations into the primary climate factors that limit or enhance tree growth at any one specific location or across larger geographic regions using a network of sites. Climate variables that can be analyzed include precipitation, temperature, pressure, various drought indices, and longer‐term, multidecadal oscillations. The overarching goal is to reconstruct climate as far back in time as the tree‐ring record allows, with a high degree of confidence, and to evaluate past climate trends over past centuries to millennia. The results from these analyses can be used in simulation models to extrapolate future trends expected in climate to better understand the possible human activities that may be contributing to ongoing global warming.
Focus Groups
Authors: Hopkins Peter
Published: March 2017

A focus group is a qualitative research method that is based around a one‐off group discussion on a specific topic that is supplied by the researcher, who tends to take on the role of the moderator. Focus groups have their origin in market research and can be used alone or in combination with a range of other data collection techniques. The keys to conducting successful focus groups are the focus of the researcher and the generation of group interaction about a specific topic. In addition, there are a range of methodological considerations that researchers should take into account when using focus groups, including the number of participants; the composition of the group; and the location, timing, and context of the group discussion.
Neighborhoods and Health
Authors: Witten Karen
Published: March 2017

Neighborhoods and health research investigates how the physical, institutional, and social characteristics of neighborhoods influence the health‐related practices and health outcomes of residents. Evidence suggests that the characteristics of places, as well as the characteristics of people living within places, affect health and health inequalities. A concern for social injustice as evidenced by spatial inequalities in health drives work in the field. Both qualitative and quantitative studies are generating new understandings in the area, the latter being aided greatly by the development of geographic information systems and multilevel modeling techniques.
Biosecurity
Authors: Hinchliffe Steve
Published: March 2017

Biosecurity, or making life safe, can be understood by attending to four of its constitutive elements: security, liberalism, a pathogen‐based and an anticipatory approach to danger. These elements, and the spatial tensions that they give rise to, make biosecurity a difficult and sometimes contested exercise in both the control
and
the nurturing of life processes.
Spatial Optimization
Authors: Ligmann‐Zielinska Arika
Published: March 2017

Spatial optimization is the use of mathematical and computational approaches to find the best solutions to geographic decision problems under strictly defined conditions. It has been applied in various geographic fields of study including land‐use science, political geography, retailing, natural resource management, transportation, and medical geography. An optimization problem consists of decision variables, objective functions, and constraints. What distinguishes spatial optimization from other forms of optimization is the explicit representation of space in the decision variables and functions used to solve the problem. Geographic decision variables represent spatial and aspatial phenomena of interest. The spatially explicit objective functions reflect the topological and nontopological spatial relations among these variables, like distance, pattern, adjacency, connectivity, shape, overlap, containment, and space partition. Solutions to spatial optimization problems are generated using exact and heuristic approaches. Spatial optimization challenges include mathematical abstraction of ill‐defined spatial problems, integration with GIS, the need for better data models, and ongoing research to develop computationally efficient solution algorithms.
Urban Uneven Development
Authors: Mele Christopher
Published: March 2017

Research on urban uneven development focuses primarily on the production of urban space as a commodity for capitalist accumulation. The free movement of capital in search of higher investment returns produces recurrent patterns of spatial unevenness; as one place is subject to disinvestment and declines, another place benefits from (re)investment and thrives. Research has shown the importance of social and cultural factors that mediate or accelerate urban uneven development as a process contingent on the interplay between structure and agency. Recent work on neoliberal urbanism has shown the increased dependence on market forces in urban governance, the expanded role of the private sector, and greater competition between localities to attract investment capital has enhanced urban uneven development.
Georeferencing: From Texts to Maps
Authors: Leidner Jochen L.
Published: March 2017

Georeferencing is the process of linking an entity with a spatial footprint. For example, a linguistic sign such as the mention of a place name (e.g., Paris) can be associated with a particular place on Earth referred to. The footprint may be a polygon or a centroid given as latitude and longitude, and the benefit of such a link lies in its enablement of automatic spatial processing of the entity by computer, such as placing the entity on a map or providing a spatial search capability. Automatic georeferencing, as a method applied to textual document collections, is described as a combination of named entity recognition (“geoparsing,” i.e., recognition and classification of mentions of place names in text) and toponym resolution (i.e., disambiguation using linguistic and spatial context as well as the selection of a single, most likely intended, spatial interpretation among a set of candidates looked up in a gazetteer).
Growth Theory
Authors: Zhao Simon Xiaobin
Published: March 2017

Growth theory is a broad term that references a number of different economic theories that focus on the relationship between economic growth and development. The theories cover both exogenous growth and endogenous growth within economies. The key theories covered are the neoclassical models, the linear stages of growth model, the structural change model, the neoliberal counterrevolution, and new growth theory.
Agents, Ontology‐Based Decision‐Support Systems
Authors: Sun Chih‐Hong , Jung Chin‐Te
Published: March 2017

Over one billion people have access to the Internet and millions of sensors are connected to the Internet currently. The Internet is flooded by mass volumes of data; however, decision‐makers are hungry for information and knowledge to help them make the correct decision. This is the real situation faced by today's knowledge workers. To solve this problem, information technology needs to be fully utilized by integrating databases in various government agencies and large volumes of information and knowledge in the academic sector to develop an intelligent decision‐support system. Intelligent spatial decision‐support systems (ISDSSs) are the major research direction in geographic information science. This entry reviews the development of the spatial decision‐support system and introduces the ontology and multi‐agent system technology that is the major technology base for the ISDSS. Finally, a multi‐agent knowledge‐oriented cyberinfrastructure is proposed for the development of ISDSSs.
Environmental Futures
Authors: Davies Anna R.
Published: March 2017

Critical thinking about environmental futures has a distinguished lineage. From Thomas More and William Morris to Ebenezer Howard and Peter Kropotkin, alternative environmental futures replete with geographical concerns regarding scale, place, and nature–society interactions have long been imagined, articulated, and critiqued. Since the 1970s, expositions of environmental futures in geography have become dominated by increasingly sophisticated modeling of environmental change. These models tend to assume a level of continuity and universality of trends that are based on scientific analyses of natural rather than social systems. In response, attempts have been made to capture the potential for societal innovation and discontinuity to shape environmental futures through more creative and participatory processes. Whatever their assumptions, articulations of environmental futures function as potential guides for decision making in the present, visualizing alternative possibilities for human and nonhuman interactions.
Migrant Division of Labor
Authors: Wills Jane
Published: March 2017

The migrant division of labor refers to the way in which the labor market can be differentiated by the immigration status of workers, complicating segmentation patterns that reflect long‐established divisions on the basis of gender and ethnicity. National rules determining the immigration status of workers can affect their access to work, to welfare and to political protection. In combination with wider labor market conditions, such laws affect the position of workers in employers' hiring queues.
Living Wage
Authors: Wills Jane
Published: March 2017

A living wage is the minimum hourly wage required to allow a worker to support her/himself and her/his dependents. It should cover the cost of food, housing, and basic needs. It is based on securing a basic standard of living in a particular geographical area.
Global Dimming/Brightening
Authors: Wild Martin
Published: March 2017

A fundamental determinant of climate and life on our planet is the solar radiation (sunlight) incident at the Earth's surface. Any change in this precious energy source affects our habitats profoundly. Until recently, for simplicity and lack of better knowledge, the amount of solar radiation received at the earth's surface was assumed to be stable over the years. However, there is increasing observational evidence that this quantity undergoes significant multidecadal variations, which need to be accounted for in discussions of climate change and solar energy applications. Coherent periods and regions with prevailing declines (“dimming”) and inclines (“brightening”) in surface solar radiation have been detected in the worldwide observational networks, often in accord with anthropogenic air pollution patterns. This entry highlights the main characteristics of this phenomenon, provides a conceptual framework for its causes, and gives an overview of potential environmental implications.
Ocean Biogeography
Authors: Briggs John C.
Published: March 2017

As the distribution of marine organisms became better known, there developed a tendency among marine biologists to describe various geographic regions based on their characteristic species. Improvement in knowledge about the ranges of individual species, and the groups to which they belonged, led to the discovery of biogeographic barriers. The recognition of barriers made possible their depiction on maps, and biologists became interested in discovering the reasons why many species were unable to surmount the barriers. Contrasts in the distribution patterns with respect to barriers and other environmental effects led to considerations of evolution and phylogeography and their relationships to biogeography. Modern research has been devoted primarily to relatively shallow waters of depths less than 200 m, but the deep sea covers 66% of the Earth and little is known about its distributional patterns. It is a promising region for future biogeographic studies.
Environmental Impact Assessment
Authors: Morgan Richard K.
Published: March 2017

Environmental impact assessment (EIA) has developed from its origins in US legislation in 1970 to become one of the most important and widely used environmental management tools. Its purpose is to ensure that the wider implications of proposals are considered before final commitments are made to proceed with an action, whether a policy or a project. Many forms of impact assessment have emerged over the last 50 years, raising the question of how to ensure coherent, integrated assessments of policy or project impacts, while recognizing the diversity and complexity of the environment potentially affected. Although EIA owes its underlying form to the rational decision‐making approaches of the second half of the twentieth century, in fact the more recent literature on best‐practice impact assessment promotes a participatory and inclusive approach, sensitive to issues of social and environmental justice and to the role of power in decision‐making.
Caregiving
Authors: Power Andrew
Published: March 2017

“Caregiving” is a complex and enduring term that denotes the physical, emotional, and psychological assistance that individuals, including family members, actors of the state, and the voluntary sector, provide to people in need of support. Given the varied relationships involved across the spectrum of care, it has become an increasingly contested term, depending on the ideologies behind it, the manner in which it is given, and who receives it. Geographers have engaged in a number of key debates and issues associated with the term, as they have tackled and contributed to our understanding of caregiving.
Snow
Authors: Schneebeli Martin
Published: March 2017

Snow is the solid crystalline precipitation of water and the only widespread high‐temperature material. Snow modifies the surface properties of the Earth during winter dramatically by increasing its albedo. Snow is a very important source of water during summer in many areas. Winter tourism depends as a major economy on snow.
Road Transport
Authors: Anderson William P.
Published: March 2017

Road transportation has become, or is becoming, the dominant mode for personal travel and freight in most parts of the world. A combination of innovations in vehicle technologies, public investment in road infrastructure, and increasing incomes has led to its rise. Its critical advantage over other forms of transportation its ability to make point‐to‐point connections for a very large number of origins and destinations. The shift to road transportation has had a profound effect on urban form and other settlement patterns. Road transportation is more energy‐intensive than alternative modes and generates negative environmental impacts. Road transportation is growing rapidly in cities of the developing world, leading to urban environmental problems and rising global greenhouse gas emissions.
Spatial Filtering
Authors: Mesev Victor
Published: March 2017

Data values continuously change in response to the geographical features they represent. Smaller changes are indicative of more homogeneous features, while larger changes indicate heterogeneity. These changes in data values are termed spatial frequencies, and they dictate the level of visual contrast. Sometimes visual contrast is very low (because of very low spatial frequencies), which can make interpretation of geographical features difficult. Spatial filtering is a technique that alters the magnitude of spatial frequencies to create higher visual contrasts between geographical features. In remote sensing, linear and nonlinear spatial filters use cell‐based windows to reduce or enhance spatial frequencies, so that geographical features can be visually smoothed or sharpened. In general statistical analysis, spatial filters are used to isolate the underlying effects of geographical variables from the effects of temporal and spatial autocorrelation.
Globalization and Rural Areas
Authors: Woods Michael
Published: March 2017

Globalization is a major driver of change in contemporary rural areas, involving the multiplication, stretching, and intensification of social, economic, political, and cultural relations over space. Processes such as the integration of the global economy, increased flows of international migration, and a growing global consciousness and standardization of values impact on rural areas affected by established economic structures, prompting changes in agriculture and land management, restructuring populations, challenging traditional cultures, and generating conflicts. The impacts of globalization processes vary between rural areas, shaped in part by the responses of rural communities through economic development strategies and protest mobilization.
Health‐Related Behaviors
Authors: Pearce Jamie
Published: March 2017

Geographical work has established that health‐related behaviors are affected by a complex array of settings operating across the life course. Health‐related behaviors include smoking, drinking, diet, and physical activity. Place influences and mediates health behaviors at different spatial scales ranging from the macro (e.g., global or national) to the micro (e.g., in schools or workplaces). This entry considers a selection of multiscalar processes that affect health‐related behaviors. Recognizing the ways in which social, physical, and cultural milieus enable and constrain health‐related behaviors is important not only for a richer understanding of these actions, but also for the development of successful health policy interventions.
Land Change Science
Authors: Turner B.L.
Published: March 2017

Land change science emerged at the end of the twentieth century as an interdisciplinary and international program and as a subfield of study addressing the causes and consequences of changes in the terrestrial surface of the Earth, including the observation and monitoring, and the modeling and projection, of that change. Its modern antecedents in geography can be traced back to Alexander von Humboldt and the German
Landschaft
traditions, linked through various iterations of human–environment relationships in the discipline. Aligned with interdisciplinary efforts addressing global environmental change and sustainability science, land change science draws on and integrates the research interests of the human or social ecologies, environmental sciences, remote‐sensing and GIS sciences, and spatial sciences.
Nature, Art, and Aesthetics
Authors: Dixon Deborah P.
Published: March 2017

Though much of geography today makes little explicit reference to either art or aesthetics, both are nevertheless key to the emergence of the discipline as a modern mode of inquiry into nature. Artistic practice, using diverse mediums, has helped physical as well as human geographers think through and convey the import of particular landscape features, while aesthetics has underpinned a multisensuous engagement with the environment through an expansive form of fieldwork. As the discipline continues to tease apart the meaning of nature as a complex object of analysis, so it has engaged more with cross‐disciplinary debates on the immersion of bodies, including that of the researcher, in a postnatural world. In the process, geographers have found common ground with practitioners in the arts and humanities who are interested in the meaning of landscapes, certainly, but also in the sensuous, emotional, and affective dimensions of research as a mode of engagement with the world.
Patriarchy
Authors: Bain Alison L. , Arik Hülya
Published: March 2017

Patriarchy is a concept originally deployed by Western, radical, second‐wave feminists to describe social structures governed by hierarchical power relations that privilege masculinity over femininity, and permit the domination, oppression, and exploitation of women by men. Such scholarship was critiqued, particularly by women of color, for producing ahistorical and acultural generalizations that overlook nuances and variations in power relations; however, anti‐essentialist poststructuralist and postmodern approaches to feminism have complicated understandings of gender and foregrounded the agency of women to bargain with patriarchy. Feminist geographical scholarship on patriarchy reveals how it is entangled in bodily and spatial ways with the historical, transterritorial, and transnational processes and particularities of capitalism and colonialism.
Central Business District
Authors: Muller Peter O.
Published: March 2017

The central business district (CBD) of the city emerged as the dominant activity center of the industrial metropolis in the 1850s and maintained its regional centrality advantage for a century. Since the 1960s, it has played a reduced role as the city turned inside out and assumed a polycentric form. After two decades of decline, a turnaround began to occur during the 1990s as the CBD expanded and evolved into a more diverse, revitalized “downtown.” A composite model of its twenty‐first‐century spatial organization underscores the new functions that have emerged. Continued reinvention is crucial to the future success of downtown, particularly in light of the powerful forces of globalization that are further fragmenting the society and economy of the American metropolis.
Modernity
Authors: Howell Philip
Published: March 2017

Modernity as a multifaceted concept can be defended from its critics, and its continuing utility asserted. This entry examines it through a tripartite focus on
modernity as project
, focusing on technical achievements;
modernity as discourse
, focusing on its cultural specificity and contestable claims; and
modernity as experience
, focusing on questions of popular consciousness and identity. Emphasis is placed not only on geographical studies carried out under these different headings, but also on the spatial politics produced by the collision of modernity as project, discourse, and experience.
Relevance Debates
Authors: Murphy Alexander B.
Published: March 2017

In the early 1970s a growing number of geographers began calling for direct disciplinary engagement with major social, political, and environmental policy challenges. Disagreements over how such work might be undertaken and whose interests it might serve came to be known as the relevance debate. In the ensuing decades, a broad commitment to relevancy came to pervade most geographic scholarship, but policy relevance was seen as only one dimension of relevancy. The current relevance debate centers on such issues as what constitutes relevancy, the degree to which geography is in fact relevant, the obstacles impeding greater relevancy, and strategies for ensuring that academic integrity is maintained when undertaking applied work.
Rail Transport: Passenger
Authors: Li Linna , Loo Becky P.Y.
Published: March 2017

Rail transport (passenger) is a means of conveying passengers by moving carriages on rail tracks. Its main forms include: high‐speed rail, intercity rail, commuter rail, light rail, metros, and trams. Worldwide, passenger rail travel is mostly concentrated in Asia and Europe. Since the nineteenth century the technology of rail transport has advanced dramatically. Although modern rail transport can have less environmental impact than other transport modes due to its high capacity, high speed, and clean energy source, its construction still needs careful planning because of its large investment and operating costs. In the near future, passenger rail transport will remain a major research focus in transport geography.
Technology
Authors: Hinchliffe Steve
Published: March 2017

For some, technology is a byword for progress or hope. For others it signals possible dehumanization and environmental degradation. Geography's value is that it tends to avoid technological determinism, refusing to read technology as necessarily progressive or regressive, and focuses instead on the spatiotemporal situations within which technologies can be understood and evaluated.
Ice Caps
Authors: Paul Frank , Ramanathan A.L. , Mandal Arindan
Published: March 2017

An ice cap is a specific type of glacier that is characterized by its radial flow and complete coverage of the bedrock; it is generally dome‐shaped with smooth surface slopes. Ice caps can be found in all glacierized regions, they can have any size (from 0.01 to 20 000 km
2
) and shape (from near circular to highly irregular), and have a number of characteristics that deserve special description. In particular their high climate sensitivity and their suitability as a paleoclimatic archive (e.g., for ice core drilling) are noteworthy. As they are also located on still active volcanoes, their melting during an eruption can threaten the population living nearby with
lahars
and
jokulhaups
. For several reasons, ice caps have not yet been properly indexed in glacier inventories, so we do not know exactly how many of them exist.
Socio‐Nature
Authors: Bear Christopher
Published: March 2017

Socio‐nature is a concept that is used to argue that society and nature are inseparable and should not be analyzed in abstraction from each other. The concept is rooted in – but operates as a critique of – Marxist approaches such as historical materialism and poststructural approaches such as actor‐network theory. Drawing on the former, it emphasizes temporality and processes of becoming, while its engagement with poststructural thought leads to a focus on ontological hybridity. At the heart of research on socio‐natures is an interest in processes of their production, and especially on the labor that is involved and the uneven power relationships that emerge.
Climate Literacy
Authors: Dupigny‐Giroux Lesley‐Ann L.
Published: March 2017

Climate literacy refers to both a body of knowledge and a way of understanding and acting in light of this knowledge. It is often confused with and used interchangeably for climate change literacy. Climate literacy is built upon a deep appreciation for interconnected processes in the atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere over varying time and space scales and the influence of humans on the climate system. Achieving climate literacy requires scientific understanding, especially of terms and concepts that have very different meanings in the public lexicon. Climate literacy is stymied by deeply ingrained misconceptions and scientific inaccuracies that require educators and lifelong learners to be aware of how we learn as humans, in order to promote the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed to apply inquiry or problem‐based approaches to new situations and decision‐making.
Soundscapes
Authors: Andrews Gavin J.
Published: March 2017

“Soundscape” denotes the way in which sound makes places, at one level in terms of their general identity and representation, and at another in terms of an immediate experience. While musical sound is a common consideration in research, all types of natural and human‐made sounds found in urban and rural environments are equally relevant. Since the mid‐1990s, much research on soundscapes has taken a social constructivist perspective to uncover their different meanings. In the new millennium however, it has been increasingly informed by nonrepresentational theory to help convey their performative realities, and how they fundamentally “take place.”
Temperature
Authors: Robeson Scott M. , Wright Timothy
Published: March 2017

Temperature determines, influences, or limits most geographic processes. Temperature within the Earth–atmosphere system is most closely related to elevation and variables that influence solar radiation, such as latitude, cloud cover, aerosols, and surface albedo. The rate of change of air temperature with latitude has large seasonal swings. In North America, January air temperatures decrease at the rate of about 1.0 to 1.5°C per degree of latitude, whereas July air temperatures decrease only 0.4 to 0.6°C per degree of latitude. The availability and proximity of water play a key role in modulating temperature via its high specific heat and through latent heat exchange. Long‐term variability in near‐surface air temperature is among the most important indicators of climate change. While there are substantial spatial and seasonal variations in the magnitude of recent climatic change, global‐scale averages of air temperature have increased approximately 0.9°C since 1880.
Infrastructure and Everyday Life
Authors: Chappells Heather
Published: March 2017

Infrastructures (energy, water, waste, transportation, and telecommunications) are preconditions for modern life, providing a foundation for economic and social development and meeting everyday needs. Infrastructure systems take on key importance in geography because of their critical role in coordinating human activities in space and time. Historically, different configurations of infrastructure, constructed to support changing political and social objectives, have profoundly influenced the organization of everyday life. In contemporary society infrastructures can be conceived as a critical conduit through which consumers become engaged with pressing concerns related to resource scarcity, environmental sustainability, and the need for sociotechnical resilience in the face of disruption.
Intermediaries
Authors: Zell Sarah
Published: March 2017

Labor market intermediaries act as brokers, facilitating job matching between employers and jobseekers. Intermediaries such as temporary employment agencies have expanded rapidly under neoliberal economic restructuring. They benefit from a demand for flexible labor and also promote it by providing just‐in‐time labor. Intermediaries contribute to the social regulation and segmentation of labor markets, often reinforcing inequalities in labor market access. Their practices impact labor mobility and agency, and they present challenges to labor organizing. Recently, intermediaries have expanded into new global markets and are playing an increasingly significant role in facilitating transnational labor migration.