bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Climate Policy
Authors: Higgins Paul A.T.
Published: March 2017

Climate policy encompasses efforts to create and use information or services that help society manage risks and realize opportunities relating to weather and climate. This includes efforts to understand and respond to routine and extreme weather and climate events. Climate policy also refers to decision‐making with respect to climate change. Climate change risk management approaches generally fall into four broad categories: (i) mitigation – efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; (ii) adaptation – increasing society's capacity to cope with changes in climate; (iii) geoengineering or climate engineering – additional, deliberate manipulation of the Earth system that is intended to counteract at least some of the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions; and (iv) knowledgebase expansion – efforts to learn and understand more about the climate system, which can help support proactive risk management. Comprehensive climate change risk management almost certainly includes a combination of policy responses.
Environmental (In)Justice
Authors: Ishiyama Noriko
Published: March 2017

Environmental (in)justice is a philosophical and political notion created and espoused by activists, policymakers, and academics to articulate important connections between environmentalism and place‐based struggles for social justice. Challenging a narrowly defined notion of environment focused solely on wilderness in a US cultural context, environmental (in)justice, is a concept embedded in geographical and historical processes, social relations, and the political–economic power structure, which also addresses issues such as classism, racism, sexism, heterosexism, and colonialism. It highlights the ecological dilemmas experienced and reproduced at the sites of daily lives.
Temperate Forest Ecosystems
Authors: McCarragher Shannon , Rigg Lesley S.
Published: March 2017

Temperate forest ecosystems are most extensively found throughout the Northern Hemisphere, and less extensively in the Southern Hemisphere. The specific regions containing temperate forests include: Europe, North America, Asia, South America, Australia, and New Zealand. Northern temperate forests are often composed of deciduous trees that drop their leaves each year, providing a supply of rich nutrients to animals and plants as they decompose. Southern temperate forests, on the other hand, are primarily composed of broad‐leaved evergreen trees that keep their leaves year round. Most temperate forest ecosystems are heavily exploited and degraded. The underlying bedrock and geology of temperate forests around the world are highly variable, as are the soils, vegetation communities, disturbances, and plant adaptations found within them.
Visualizing Uncertainty
Authors: Beard Kate
Published: March 2017

Uncertainty is endemic to our world and the data collected and assembled in databases to represent the world. Because uncertainty is frequently not explicitly represented, it is often not considered and assessed as a routine part of analyses. Understanding uncertainties and the implications for decision‐making are important. As the rate of data collection accelerates, and with much of it being automated, grappling with data uncertainties becomes an ever more pressing concern. When data, maps, or other information products do not indicate otherwise, users generally assume and treat them to be without error. Visualization has been identified as one means to help draw attention to uncertainty and its implications. Research on the visualization of uncertainty has been addressed in geographic information science since the early 1990s. As understanding and measures of uncertainty have evolved and as new technologies generate new sources of spatial data, this research area has continued to evolve. This entry reviews the evolving characterization of uncertainty, methods for visualizing uncertainty, and some studies that have evaluated such visualizations.
Paleoecology
Authors: Yansa Catherine H.
Published: March 2017

Paleoecology involves the study of fossils (proxies) to reconstruct ecosystems of the past. Fossils are identified by morphological comparisons to living species, and ecosystems are reconstructed by using the modern analog concept estimates for temperature and precipitation ranges, water chemistry, and other ecological parameters that can be obtained for the past. This paleoecological information, in turn, provides a long‐term perspective of how organisms respond to climate and environmental changes, complementing biogeographic studies of living plants and animals. Commonly investigated proxies include microscopic pollen, plant macrofossils, charcoal, diatoms, ostracods, midges, beetles, testate amoebae, phytoliths, packrat middens, and the bones of Pleistocene megafauna. All of these proxies have particular strengths in providing valuable biogeographic records that span centuries to millennia. A brief multiproxy reconstruction of landscape and climate changes in North America, during and after the last glaciation, illustrates this process.
River Ice and Ice Jams
Authors: Boucher Étienne
Published: March 2017

Ice cover formation and breakup is a ubiquitous characteristic of cold‐environment fluvial systems. Ice covers have important economic, geomorphic, and environmental consequences, particularly through the formation of breakup ice jams that threaten riparian communities and infrastructures. The magnitude and frequency of these phenomena are intricately linked to hydrologic and climatic conditions, and for that reason, ongoing climate change is likely to have important consequences for river ice regimes. River ice dynamics, however, remain difficult to document because of the complexity of the processes involved.
Power and Development
Authors: Lawhon Mary , Pierce Joseph
Published: March 2017

Development is a power‐laden process involving the reconfiguration of power relations between individuals and institutions as well as across spaces and scales. Geographers have participated (and continue to participate) in the exertion of power by providing data and theoretical justification for development, while also providing critical analysis of these processes. Scholars have argued that development is enabled and constrained by power entangled in global political economic relations, in economic relations at the micro‐scale, and by the practice of intentional development actors. Further, power is exerted through the discourse of development which promotes universalized notions of progress and societal evolution.
Skill
Authors: Siemiatycki Elliot
Published: March 2017

The concept of skill has been closely linked to some of the most significant debates in the social sciences over the past half‐century including the “deskilling debates” of the 1970s and 1980s regarding the growing levels of income inequality and ideas emanating from human geography about creativity and innovation. Yet it is a difficult term to define and has been studied in many different ways across various academic disciplines. This entry details how skill has been studied in the economic sphere and the particular contribution that geographers have made to understanding the locational dynamics of differentially skilled workers.
Trade,
FDI
, and Industrial Development
Authors: Yeung Godfrey
Published: March 2017

International trade and foreign direct investment are regarded as the catalysts for industrial and regional development. The ownership‐location‐internalization paradigm explains the rationales for the patterns of foreign direct investment, while the neoclassical international trade model hypothesizes that free trade promotes industrial development and reduces regional disparity across space. Augmented with the new trade theory and new growth models, these economic theories laid the foundation for the trade and capital account liberalization proposed in the Washington Consensus. A number of social scientists questioned the validity of these mainstream theories and economic geographers have largely examined these issues from the perspective of the agglomeration of economic activities, the role of tacit knowledge in technological transfer, and the roles of state on flows of capital and commodities and its complex structure of governance between the different economic actors in host and home countries.
Firm Foundation and Growth
Authors: Yeung Godfrey
Published: March 2017

The firm is an intermediate agent to reduce the transaction costs incurred in dealing with individual economic actors. The firm acts as a nexus of contracts to allow transactions to be internalized and coordinated efficiently in the circular flow of production and consumption. Economic geographers highlight the interlinked relationships between institutions (the formal rules and regulations and informal norms) and industrial practices, and how these shape firm behavior. Institutions not only regulate industrial best practices and conventions, but also shape the values and expectations of economic actors through the functioning of labor markets, regimes of industrial relations, and corporate governance. Case examples of law firms and staff agencies illustrate the central argument made by economic geographers: diverse national institutions create heterogeneous industrial practices over space, and their reproduction and modification results in distinctive national/regional modes of governance and trajectories of growth in firms, rather than their global convergence.
Spatial Sampling
Authors: Wang Jin‐Feng
Published: March 2017

Spatial sampling selects a sample from a geographically distributed target population, and then uses the sample to infer parameters of the target population, such as the mean and values at unsampled sites. A good sample provides accurate inference using a small sample size, which is determined by the properties of the target, the method of sampling, and the methods of inference, known collectively as the spatial sampling trinity. A simple random sample may be less efficient when the target presents spatial autocorrelation and stratified heterogeneity. These properties are taken into account in spatial sampling.
Internationalization
Authors: Ström Patrik
Published: March 2017

Internationalization is a vital part of the world economy. It is the process that helps to connect places and firms. It can be based on macroeconomic dimensions in relation to the spatial configuration of activities, but it is also connected to the locational strategy of firms. Internationalization is examined from a range of different perspectives with a focus on how it can be interpreted and what it means for the spatial dynamics of the world economy.
Climate Change and Biogeography
Authors: Goldblum David , Carrier Christine
Published: March 2017

Biogeographers have long studied physical and biological factors that determine the distribution of species at local, regional, and global scales. This interest initially focused on contemporary species distributions, but as high quality fossil evidence became available biogeographers expanded their research into temporal patterns, often extending to the start of the Holocene or even into the Pleistocene in some locations. Specifically, in the latter decades of the twentieth century research extended to describing the dynamics of species ranges associated with past climates (glacial periods) and species' response to warming in the Holocene. More recently, since anthropogenic climate change has been recognized as a potential driver of environmental change in the coming century, biogeographers have applied what has been learned about species' responses to postglacial warming to describing species' response to recent warming and modeling ecosystem reactions to future climate change.
Water Security
Authors: Giordano Mark
Published: March 2017

A discourse around water security has rapidly evolved since the mid‐2000s and has taken two distinct tracks, one within the traditional security concerns of international relations and the other integrating the idea within the broader constructs of human security. In some cases, water security language is used to signal water scarcity or water problems in general; in others, it is used to move thinking and action on water agendas; and, in yet others, it is used instrumentally to bring urgency and resources to water issues. With multiple uses, multiple definitions have also developed, with differing emphases on spatial and temporal scales and differing concepts of what it means to be water‐secure. Reframing water in security language has brought new actors into the water arena and likely broadened awareness of water problems, but it is not clear that it has fundamentally changed the way water problems are approached.
Climate Change Policy
Authors: Bailey Ian
Published: March 2017

This entry examines debates in geography and related disciplines on climate change policy. It begins by reviewing some of the main challenges facing climate policy, where attention is drawn to disputes over burden sharing between countries in the Global North and the Global South on action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve the capacity of countries and communities to adapt to the effects of climate change. It then examines the characteristics of climate mitigation, adaptation, and loss and damages policies, and debates about the boundaries and goals of climate policy. Following this, climate politics and governance at the international, national, and transnational scales are examined, where particular attention is paid to the increasingly multi‐actor and multiscalar nature of climate governance and critical scholarship on carbon markets and the implications of these trends for traditional “state‐centric” conceptualizations of climate policy. The entry concludes by examining key debates on adaptation and loss and damages policy.
Treeline Ecotones
Authors: Elliott Grant P.
Published: March 2017

An ecotone is a boundary or transition zone between types of vegetation or biomes that is bracketed by more homogeneous types. Ecotones are created by environmental gradients that ultimately govern the physiological and reproductive range limits of species from adjacent ecosystems. On a global scale the most prominent and well‐studied ecotones are those between forests and lower‐stature vegetation in the Arctic, on mountains, and across savannas. The history of treeline research is rich with examples of terminological misunderstanding and issues of spatial scale. Given the relatively high levels of stress imposed on species growing at or near the edge of what may be referred to as their bioclimatic envelope, the dynamics of ecotone boundaries are widely considered to be sensitive proxies for climate variability, especially for warming at arctic and alpine treelines. Savanna ecotones present a contrast in that indirect processes such as fire complicate the environmental gradient.
Travel Geographies
Authors: Zusman Perla , Castro Hortensia
Published: March 2017

Traveling involves a displacement of people and cultures across space that impacts on the material and imaginary geographies of places. Poststructuralism and the cultural turn in geography have opened the field for the study of travel and travel narratives not just as objective information about places, but as political and cultural practices involved in domination strategies. Viewed in this way, journeys are understood to play a part in the creation of geographical imaginations and landscapes that have contributed to the development of imperial practices and the formation of extra‐European nation‐states. At the same time, travel geographies have explored the ways in which class, gender, and ethnic differences affect how a journey is envisaged and how the bonds between places of origin and destination are negotiated.
Location‐Based Services
Authors: Bakillah Mohamed , Liang Steve H.L. , Zipf Alexander
Published: March 2017

The past decade has seen major advances in location‐based technologies and geospatial information. Gradually, the public's awareness and consideration of the spatial aspects of life are increasing, due to the ubiquity of so‐called location‐based services (LBS). While popular navigation or mapping services like Google Maps have contributed to this “revolution,” today's LBS include an amazing variety of services and are imposing themselves in a much larger spectrum of daily activities. The current evolution of LBS suggests that in the near future, when certain technological challenges have been overcome, geolocated information about a large number of people and objects in our environment will be available anytime and anywhere, in a way that will be tailored to users' needs, and LBS will be embedded in daily life. Within this context, this entry reviews the current state of LBS‐related issues and research, starting with an overview of historical development and current applications, an analysis of the impacts of LBS, and a discussion of current and future challenges that the research community is facing in shaping the future of LBS.
Regional Political Movements
Authors: Keating Michael
Published: March 2017

Modernist political science has downplayed the importance of territory in the search for universal theories, but territory has always served to shape political competition. Since the late twentieth century, regions have emerged as significant political spaces. This is partly due to functional change but that does not determine political alignments. Regions are socially and politically constructed in different ways. New parties have emerged in defense of territorial interests and to seek territorial autonomy. Regions have been constructed as political arenas, shaping party competition and electoral outcomes in distinctive ways.
Trade Unions
Authors: Jordhus‐Lier David
Published: March 2017

Trade unionism is a key phenomenon of our social world, as worker organizations have established a presence throughout our recent history reaching across the globe. This entry accounts for how trade unions have become a subject of study within the geography discipline. Four foci of trade union geographies are discussed: the spatial distribution of organized labor since industrialization; the ways in which trade unionism is embedded in identities, places, and societies; the concept of scale as a lens through which to understand trade unions' successes and challenges; and, finally, the organic relationship between geographers and trade unionists and how this tie has shaped political analysis.
Regional Unemployment and Regional Labor Markets
Authors: Theodore Nik
Published: March 2017

Capitalist economies undergo the continual creation and destruction of jobs, leading to rising and falling levels of unemployment and producing uneven impacts across places, regions, territories, and scales. Economic geographers have advanced a distinctive approach to the study of regional labor markets and regional unemployment, one that sees labor market restructuring as a variegated sociospatial process. Theoretically and methodologically at odds with neoclassical economics, geographical perspectives on the labor market focus on the endemic spatial disequilibrium of the economy, the social structuration of the labor market, and on regional economies as fields structured by power relations. Unemployment, and which workers become unemployed, is therefore the outcome of geographically specific social processes.
Landscape Iconography and Perception
Authors: Luginbühl Yves
Published: March 2017

Social perceptions of landscapes are inherited from the history of relationships between societies and nature. Several landscape models have stood out in the course of the centuries: the pastoral or bucolic, the land of plenty, present since antiquity, to which have been added since the eighteenth century the sublime and the picturesque. Art and literature played an essential role in the formation and the spreading of these models, but today several scales of perception can be identified: a global one referring to these models, a second one on a local scale and expressing attachment to a place, to the local culture of nature, or to the social relationships in a place, and finally, an individual scale in reference to the landscaped experience of the individual. Nowadays, citizens' experiences of participation in the planning of their living environment emphasize perceptions on a local scale.
Discourse
Authors: Law Andrew
Published: March 2017

Different schools of thought on discourse have been taken up and reconceptualized by geographers through issues of space, place, landscape, the economy, politics (particularly geopolitics), and identity. Human geography is not simply a receptacle of discourse theory, but must be regarded as an agent of discourse theory in its own right.
Labor Market Segmentation
Authors: Berndt Christian
Published: March 2017

Labor market segmentation theories arose as an alternative to neoclassical notions of labor and labor markets in the 1970s. After briefly revisiting the strengths and the weaknesses of this approach, the article discusses more recent developments around the question of difference and diversity in labor markets, directing attention to three key developments associated with the rise of neoliberal capitalism: (i) the formation of entrepreneurial subjectivities and the treatment of labor as a diverse human resource; (ii) the blurring of the boundaries of the business firm and the implications for labor; and (iii) offshoring and “governance at a distance.”
Droughts and Water Shortages
Authors: Gamble Douglas W.
Published: March 2017

Drought is a ubiquitous and insidious natural hazard that can potentially impact any location worldwide. Given the unique nature of drought at any given location, it is very difficult to develop a universal definition and prescription for drought. Each drought event must be evaluated within its regional geographic and human activity context. Currently, drought experts are utilizing new technology to monitor and to improve forecasts and predictions of drought that will be vital in addressing the greater potential for drought in an anthropogenically warmed climate. Geographers are poised to contribute to these efforts by using a unique perspective that stresses the spatial components and scale of drought.
Biogeography
Authors: Lorimer Jamie , Hodgetts Timothy
Published: March 2017

The subdiscipline of biogeography concerns the diversity and distribution of living organisms, investigating where these are found and the possible reasons why. Whereas traditional biogeography focuses almost solely on environmental and ecological factors, a variety of alternative approaches exist which explore geographies of the “bio” in wider terms. Rejecting distinctions between human and nonhuman life, and between natural and cultural spaces, these alternatives provide a wealth of conceptual resources for developing a more socio‐natural biogeography. This entry highlights a number of such possibilities, which emphasize posthumanist understandings of “nature,” the implications of proliferating knowledge controversies, and the various forms of politics and economics implicated in the spacing and placing of nonhuman life.
Geomorphological Mapping and Geospatial Technology
Authors: Bishop Michael P. , Houser Chris
Published: March 2017

Fieldwork and geomorphological mapping have been, and continue to be, important for the study of surface processes, process–form relationships, feedback mechanisms, system couplings, and landscape evolution. Geomorphological mapping has traditionally been a qualitative activity based upon human interpretation and intuition, but the rapid proliferation of geospatial technologies has transformed geomorphological assessment and mapping into an increasingly quantitative endeavor that is rapidly evolving. Numerous developments in geodesy, remote sensing, geographic information and geophysical technology, and high‐performance computing have revolutionized geomorphological mapping. These developments allow surface biophysical, morphological, and near‐surface spatiotemporal data to be integrated and used to develop maps that portray the complexity of geomorphological systems. As conceptual understanding of the landscape and human analytical reasoning continue to serve as the basis for geomorphological mapping, new methodological approaches are being developed to use analytical reasoning to objectively map individual landforms and the broader landscape. This requires, however, conceptual and mathematical formalization of issues in areas of data collection, representation, semantic modeling, scale, indeterminate boundaries, information extraction, information integration, and geovisualization to ensure that geomorphological mapping becomes fundamental to integrative science. Nevertheless, geographers will play a leading role in developing new geospatial technologies to improve the ability to study process mechanics, rates and regimes, process–form relationships, scale dependencies of surface processes and feedback mechanisms, and polygenetic landscape evolution.
Ice Shelf Buttressing
Authors: Goldberg Daniel N.
Published: March 2017

Parts of the margins of the Antarctic and (to a lesser extent) Greenland ice sheets are marked by floating ice shelves which are fed by fast‐flowing ice streams from the ice sheet interior. While these ice shelves do not contribute directly to sea level, they play an important role in restraining the flow of ice from the ice sheet. This restraint is often referred to as ice shelf buttressing, and it is potentially of great importance to the stability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, much of which rests on a bed far below sea level. In certain regions, relatively warm ocean waters gain access to the base of ice shelves leading to thinning, severely limiting the buttressing ability of the shelves. Other ice shelves are vulnerable to rapid collapse due to surface meltwater that deepens crevasses. Both effects could be exacerbated by warming oceans and atmosphere.
Climate Change and Sea Ice
Authors: Comiso Josefino C.
Published: March 2017

Global warming signals are observed in the atmosphere, land, ocean, and ice from multiple instrumental and paleoclimatic sources. Data indicate regional warming and changes in precipitation patterns. The heat content of the ocean up to 700 m depth has increased significantly while the contrast between wet regions and dry regions over the oceans has increased over the past 60 years. Among the strongest signals of warming are those from polar regions where climate change is amplified and increases in temperature caused significant changes in the timing of the melt season, retreats in the snow cover, loss of mass in ice sheet and glaciers, and thawing of the permafrost. But among the most dramatic changes observed on a global scale have been the rapid decline of the perennial and multiyear ice cover in the Arctic during the 1979 to 2013 period. Such decline can cause profound changes in the Arctic environment and the Earth's climate system.
Agriculture
Authors: Robinson Guy M.
Published: March 2017

Land used for growing crops occupies around 11% of the world's land surface, with approximately half of the remaining area used as pasture or extensive grazing for animals. The various systems of agricultural production have profound environmental demands, creating agroecosystems in which human activity modifies soil fertility, vegetation, flora, and microclimate. These dynamic systems utilize natural resource inputs, principally climate, water supply, and soils. Microclimate modification and irrigation are prime examples of ways in which farmers modify the environment to produce conditions favorable to the growth of agricultural crops. “Agricultural” soils have been created, which act as reservoirs of water, minerals, and nutrients needed for plant growth. Concerns over the future viability of agriculture acknowledge that many aspects of human‐induced climate change may be antithetical to maintaining current patterns of production. However, agriculture itself contributes to climate change via its role in greenhouse gas emissions. Future demands to increase output to feed a rising population may involve further intensifications to production systems, using advances in biotechnology and thereby further modifying agroecosystems.
Scale
Authors: Zhang Jingxiong
Published: March 2017

Scale is a fundamental issue in geography, transcending geospatial conceptualization, measurements, processing, analysis, visualization, and problem‐solving. This entry summarizes the key concepts, models, and methods relevant to describing, modeling, and changing scales in geographic research and applications.
Vertical Integration
Authors: Hsu Jinn‐yuh , Kao Shih‐yang
Published: March 2017

Vertical integration/disintegration are concepts that scholars use to describe the change of firm ownership structure along a given production chain. In the 1970s and 1980s in several parts of the world (e.g., central Italy and southern California) there appeared clusters of small firms which engaged in the production of highly specialized products. These clusters (or industrial districts) were in sharp contrast to the highly vertically integrated global firms (who engage in mass production) that had existed before. Within economic geography, while regulation school scholars argued that the phenomenon signals a transformation of capitalism from Fordism to post‐Fordism, scholars who adopted a more evolutionary approach argue that the move toward vertical disintegration is the result of innovation in industrial organization.
Data Structure, Raster
Authors: Mennis Jeremy
Published: March 2017

The raster data structure is an approach for encoding spatial data computationally for use within a geographic information system. Its organizational strategy is the exhaustive tessellation of space into a set of nonoverlapping spatial units, typically square grid cells. The raster data structure is location‐based in that for each grid cell location a value is recorded. The full raster encoding is thus simply a matrix or 2‐D array or values. The resolution of a raster is defined as the length that one individual grid cell represents on the earth surface. Because raster data volumes can grow to be very memory intensive, compression algorithms have been developed to reduce raster data storage, including lossy and lossless approaches. Run length encoding and quadtrees are two of the most prominent lossless compression raster data structures.
Development
Authors: Potter Rob B. , Conway Dennis
Published: March 2017

Development is a core concept in the social sciences that often frames debates, policies, and critical perspectives related to social, economic, and political change and human–environment relations in the Global South and North. This entry provides an analytical overview of the evolving nature of the cross‐disciplinary field(s) of development studies from their beginning in the 1940s to the present. It reviews both mainstream theories and the plethora of alternative development theories and models that have been forwarded, practiced, criticized, discarded, and replaced in the past half century. The evolution of the field of development geography/studies reflects numerous changes and transformations in the ways and means through which socioeconomic progress might be achieved – good, bad, better, progressive, and radical. A particular challenge in the current era relates to the impress of neoliberal ideologies and their inability to address pressing questions of inequality – within and between Northern and Southern contexts.
Soil Mapping and Maps
Authors: Bromley Matthew C. , Miller Bradley A.
Published: March 2017

Soil mapping is one of the most important scientific endeavors for inventorying and monitoring natural resources because soils are integral to all ecosystems. For this reason, understanding and representing the spatial distribution of soils has been a part of human history since the dawn of civilization. Over time, the process of mapping soils has necessarily evolved from general human interpretations to more quantitative definitions. The demand for soil maps continues to grow. While they continue to support the needs of agriculture, construction, and conservation, soil maps are increasingly utilized to address environmental issues. Because of the great complexity of soil landscapes, special techniques are needed for gathering data and communicating soils information in a manner useful to the map user. Although the basic concepts established by extensive fieldwork over the past century remain at the core of soil mapping methods, technologies such as high‐resolution digital elevation models and spatial analysis are being leveraged to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of soil mapping today.
Competitiveness
Authors: Rubalcaba Luis
Published: March 2017

The notion of competitiveness is attracting more and more attention in the new globalized economic geography. Cities, regions, and countries compete to increase their standards of life, their growth, and their welfare. Competition is not necessarily a negative concept, indicating a fight against other economic entities, but it can also be a positive concept, in which all entities try to achieve something good. From an ontological perspective competitiveness can thus be defined as several units, such as cities, regions, and countries, with a common aspiration making a deliberate effort to achieve that goal. Win–win games dominate in the global area, but coexist with some zero sum games. The balance depends on the type and the size of the economic units and on systemic dynamics. Many drivers of competitiveness have been explored and the most important measurement methods today are based on a comprehensive multidimensional set of macro and micro indicators. Further conceptual and measurement developments, the role of drivers related to new global value chains, and the policy implications are the basis for further research.
Bioprospecting and Biopiracy
Authors: Neimark Benjamin D.
Published: March 2017

Since its introduction at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, bioprospecting (drug discovery from nature) has been heralded by the conservation community as a model for achieving sustainable development in areas of high biodiversity. Yet, bioprospecting was continually confronted by critics who deemed it nothing less than biopiracy, or the misappropriation of traditional knowledge and nature. This critique eventually transformed the practice in many ways, including how scientists were able to access and share benefits from commercialization. Even today, as bioprospectors try to reinvent themselves through new technologies and scientific approaches, resistance to the commercialization of nature and knowledge remains deeply entrenched.
Idealism
Authors: Jeffrey Alex
Published: March 2017

The study of idealism explores how human interpretation shapes understandings of reality. This philosophical approach has been popular in certain strands of human geography, in particular following the challenges to logical positivism advanced from the 1970s onward. While idealist perspectives have been important for qualitative studies that seek to understand human subjectivity, they have also been criticized for failing to adequately account for the variability of human experience and the constraints that structure human thought.
Metadata
Authors: Poore Barbara S.
Published: March 2017

Metadata, or data about data, was first standardized by the Federal Geographic Committee (FGDC) in the 1990s. Metadata describe the origins, contents, quality, and distribution information of geospatial datasets. Metadata were intended to help organizations better manage their investments in data, promote data sharing among organizations, and help users understand datasets produced by others. The FGDC metadata standard and further work by other standards organizations spawned a global spatial data infrastructure movement. The emergence of Internet mapping platforms such as Google Maps, as well as crowdsourced wiki maps projects such as OpenStreetMap, have challenged the ascendance of structured formal metadata. In these systems, metadata are either omitted or diffused in ancillary systems of participation. These map projects may provide examples of how formal metadata can be made more user friendly.
Representation: Trajectories
Authors: Laube Patrick
Published: March 2017

A trajectory is the spatiotemporal footprint that an object leaves behind when its movement is tracked. As tracking technologies get better and cheaper, trajectory data advances to an important type of geographic information representing the movement of people, animals, goods, or any objects that move in geographic space. Movement analysis by means of computers requires the respective trajectories to be represented using models of the movement traces and the embedding movement spaces. The way in which a specific movement trajectory can be represented results from the interplay of four important dimensions: the characteristics of the underlying (geographic) space embedding the movement; the characteristics of the movement process itself; the perspective of observation; and, finally, the semantic aggregation level of the targeted analysis.
Ontology: Domain Applications
Authors: Wiegand Nancy
Published: March 2017

Applying and advancing semantic technology in the geospatial domain is an active area of work. Semantic technology includes ontologies, linked data, and associated languages, standards, and software. Ontologies describe a domain and can be used for semantic understanding. For example, a Semantic Web is enabled by referencing information on web pages to formal ontologies, which give context for a domain and allow automatic processing. Ontologies also enhance search for geospatial data, allow data integration, and can resolve semantic heterogeneity when querying across datasets. Geospatial data are also being put into the resource description framework (RDF) linked data format and made available over the web as part of the linked open data project. Web‐based query languages, such as GeoSPARQL, have been developed that include spatial operators, enabling a Geospatial Semantic Web.
Biodiversity
Authors: Gillespie Thomas W.
Published: March 2017

Biodiversity can be defined as the variation of life forms (genetic, species, taxa) within a given ecosystem or region, or across the entire Earth. Measurements of biodiversity have been undertaken by humans for thousands of years. Recently, there has been a rapid evolution of genetic techniques and geographical information systems databases that have changed the way biodiversity is studied. Latitudinal gradients of species are well established, with an increase in diversity from the poles toward the equator. Gradients of temperature and precipitation, along with area, environmental stability, and geographic uniqueness explain a majority of these latitudinal patterns for most taxa. Global datasets of species and taxonomic groups in terrestrial and marine environments have provided great insight into the distribution and diversity of species. Gradients of biodiversity have been shaped by millions of years of evolution and environmental changes, and increases in human populations have significantly changed levels and patterns of biodiversity. A number of techniques have been designed to protect biodiversity, such as identifying endangered species, developing international conventions and national laws, and designating protected areas. There are also a number of methods employed by scientists and geographers to analyze and preserve biodiversity into the next century.
Volunteered Geographic Information: Quality Assurance
Authors: Haklay Mordechai (Muki)
Published: March 2017

Volunteered geographic information is information that originates outside the realm of professional data collection by scientists, surveyors, and geographers. Quality assurance of such information is important in defining if it is fit for purpose. There are several approaches that can be used to provide quality assurance. These include the “crowdsourcing” approach, which relies on the number of people that edited the information, the “social” approach, based on gatekeepers and moderators, the “geographic” approach, which uses broader geographic knowledge, the “domain” approach, which relates to the understanding of the knowledge domain of the information, the “instrumental observation” approach, which relies on technology, and the “process‐oriented” approach, which follows a procedure to ensure that the data is of adequate quality. These approaches need to be used with an understanding of the fitness for purpose of the information for a specific context and task.
Geovisualization of Social Media
Authors: Croitoru Arie , Crooks Andrew , Radzikowski Jacek , Stefanidis Anthony
Published: March 2017

The proliferation of social media over the last decade is presenting substantial computational challenges associated with the management, processing, analysis, and visualization of the corresponding massive volumes of data. Furthermore, this new form of information also imposes newfound challenges upon the geographical community due to the unique nature of its content, as analyzing such data calls for a hybrid mix of spatial and social analysis. The spatial content of social media comprises primarily coordinates from which the contributions originate, or references to specific locations. At the same time, these data have a strong social component, as they can reveal the underlying social structure of the user community through manifestations of their interactions. Analyzing both the spatial and social content of social media feeds is referred to as geosocial analysis. Within this entry we explore the geovisualization opportunities and challenges that are emerging as social media are becoming the subject of study of the geographical community.
Tectonic Geomorphology
Authors: Owen Lewis Andrew
Published: March 2017

Tectonic geomorphology is a relatively young branch of geomorphology, which in essence examines the role of endogenetic and exogenetic processes in landscape development and their implications for hazard mitigation. Research in tectonic geomorphology, together with newly developing technologies and methodologies, has rapidly evolved during the past few decades. Tectonic landforms are diverse, ranging from continental‐scale features to submeter scale forms, and include active mountain ranges, plateaus, basins, volcanic island arcs, linear valleys, escarpments, marine terraces, fault scarps, shutter ridges, sag ponds, landslides, and sand blows, among others. Areas of emphasis have included: the study of the development of fault and fold systems; landscape evolution of active plate margins, passive margins, continental interiors and plateaus; mountain building and erosion; volcanic processes and landforms, and volcanic hazard mitigation; paleoseismology and seismic hazard assessment; and the interaction and the relationships between tectonics, climate change and erosion, and polygenetic landscapes.
Knowledge‐Intensive Business Services and Regional Development: Strategic Importance of
Authors: Shearmur Richard
Published: March 2017

Knowledge‐intensive business services (KIBS) have emerged as a key sector in the knowledge economy, both as conveyors of expertise and as vectors of information exchange playing an important – but sometimes underappreciated – role in innovation dynamics. They can contribute to the economy directly by exporting, and indirectly by assisting other economic actors in their export‐oriented business activities. A key question has been, and remains, the extent to which local economies require KIBS in their midst or can benefit from KIBS imported from other regions. Attracting and retaining KIBS locally may seem attractive to regions seeking to diversify their economies and enhance their local innovation systems, but it is far from certain that such a strategy is feasible or likely to succeed: local establishments may benefit more from interacting with specialized KIBS in other regions (often cities), and new communications technologies, combined with intermittent face‐to‐face meetings, are making this increasingly possible.
Geodemographic Profiling
Authors: Longley Paul A.
Published: March 2017

Geodemographics is defined as the analysis of people by where they live. This entry describes its roots in urban sociology and its subsequent use as a means of profiling neighborhood areas for commercial and public service planning applications. Geodemographics has traditionally provided a framework for understanding human identity using data from cross‐sectional social surveys and business data. It can be enriched through use of geotemporal data derived from a range of data sources, including biosocial and social media.
Indexing
Authors: Cheng Changxiu
Published: March 2017

Indexing is an important method to improve searching performance. Conventional index types do not handle spatial queries efficiently. Therefore, spatial indexing is designed specifically to enhance spatial search algorithms. Common spatial index methods include grid, quad‐tree, and R‐tree. These methods divide data space into several partitions and record the relations between partitions and minimum bounding rectangles (
MBR
) of spatial objects. When a spatial database management system receives a spatial query request, it first uses an index to locate possible candidate objects, identifies the
MBRs
that satisfy the given query condition, and then selects the candidate objects that meet the query criteria. This entry focuses on indexing to support the filter step of a spatial search by limiting the search space and avoiding many unnecessary comparisons. It concludes by discussing some new developments of spatial indexing in big data applications.
Life Course Approach
Authors: Hardill Irene , Monk Janice
Published: March 2017

Quantitative and qualitative human geographers employ the concept of the life course to study chronological age along with nondeterministic conceptualizations of age. The approach has been especially used to understand the lives of children, young people, and older people. Greater attention has been paid to examining women's lives than men's, though life course approaches have also been used to understand “coupledom” (primarily of heterosexual couples). Often mixed methods are used, and increasingly this involves mixing qualitative approaches with visual methods. Researchers have also addressed the ethical and political implications of their work.
Environmental Restoration
Authors: Eden Sally
Published: March 2017

“Environmental restoration” and “ecological restoration” refer to a range of methods that aim to repair human damage to ecosystems and landscapes. These include removing or reintroducing species, redirecting river channels, re‐establishing flooding regimes, and replanting woodland. Other terms used are “environmental rehabilitation” when restoration is only partial, “restoration ecology” when restoration is used in scientific research, and “rewilding,” which is becoming more popular. Since the 1980s, proponents of environmental restoration have argued that it can have positive benefits for scientific knowledge and for connecting people with nature. However, critics have argued that not only is environmental restoration impossible in practice, but it also threatens more legitimate forms of conservation and may even be used to justify causing more environmental damage. Such arguments often involve different understandings of what “nature” is and how geographers and others should conceptualize human–nonhuman relationships.