bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Language Geographies
Authors: Withers Charles W.J.
Published: March 2017

The term “language geographies” involves the study of the changing geographical distribution and social usage of language, or of its constituent parts and variant forms, and of the ways in which language embodies and enables power and authority. Three main and related themes connecting the study of geography and language may be identified. The first includes the proper words we use to describe the world, geography's terminology included, and is evident in the associations among toponomy, cartography, and identity. The second, embracing the connections between language and geographical area, is variously termed “language geography” (language's areal differentiation over time and space), “linguistic geography,” “geolinguistics,” or “dialect geography” (the geographical differentiation of language's internal structures and lexicon). The third incorporates the study of language within geography as an academic discourse, and of language as a means to intellectual authority and cultural and political power.
Enlightenment Geographies
Authors: Withers Charles W.J.
Published: March 2017

The Enlightenment, usually taken to be an intellectual phenomenon and a historical period, broadly equivalent to the “long” eighteenth century in Europe, should also be understood as a matter of geography with global reach and significance. The term “Enlightenment geographies” embraces three related concerns: the importance of
where
questions, and matters of scale, space, and place, in explaining what the Enlightenment was; the explanation of philosophical inquiries concerning human difference, cosmopolitanism, sociability, and comparative cultural development with reference to geographical factors, such as climate; and the content and purpose of geography as a subject and as a set of practices in the Enlightenment. Thinking geographically about the Enlightenment in these ways has challenged essentialist conceptions of
the
Enlightenment, and nation‐based interpretations of the Enlightenment as only a European enterprise. Explanation of the Enlightenment's spatial dimensions extends from the broader “spatial turn” in the humanities and social sciences since the 1990s, including evident recognition of the importance of geography in the history of science in particular, and in studies of colonialism and of imperial history in general.
Data Quality Standards
Authors: Johnston Jerry J.
Published: March 2017

Data quality standards for geographic data enable data producers to present potential data consumers with structured and standardized information describing the accuracy, validity, and provenance of their data. Data consumers can use this information to determine whether a geographic dataset is appropriate for their intended application. Data consumers can also directly participate in the documentation of data quality they have utilized through the use of collaboration tools and capabilities on the Internet. When one evaluates and uses geographic datasets that do not have formal documentation of data quality available from the producer, the mechanisms for using social media and volunteered geographic information constructs to document data quality become increasingly important and valuable.
Tropical Cyclones and Tropical Climate
Authors: Hobgood Jay S.
Published: March 2017

Hurricane is the strongest classification given to tropical cyclones over the Atlantic and Eastern North Pacific Oceans. The hurricane will be used as the basis of a broader discussion of tropical cyclones in this entry. These low‐pressure systems are characterized by a warm core in the middle and upper troposphere. Bands of showers and thunderstorms spiral into the central eyewall, which surrounds the clear eye in the center of a hurricane. Outflow in the upper troposphere generates a canopy of cirrus clouds over these storms. Strong winds, heavy rain, and a storm surge create potential hazards. The frequency of hurricanes can be affected by large‐scale oscillations in the atmosphere and oceans, such as the El Niño/Southern Oscillation and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation.
Time–Space Convergence
Authors: Janelle Donald G.
Published: March 2017

Time–space convergence (TSC) refers to the decline in travel time between geographical locations as a result of transportation, communication, and related technological and social innovations. TSC influences the development of cities and their economic competitiveness in regional and global economies; it also relates to the everyday life of people, their accessibility to public services, and their capabilities to engage with the world beyond their immediate place of residence.
Representation
Authors: Gilmartin Mary
Published: March 2017

Geography and geographers have had a long‐standing interest in representation, which is both a process and a product. How geographers understand representation has shifted, however, from a belief that a representation should be an accurate portrayal of something to a focus on representation as a contested process. This is sometimes described as the “crisis of representation.” It has resulted in a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between representation, politics, and power, which remains influential within contemporary academic geography.
Microbial Biogeography
Authors: Hanson China A.
Published: March 2017

Microbial biogeography aims to characterize the distribution of micro‐organisms over space and time while elucidating the relative importance of the ecological and evolutionary mechanisms that lead to those distributions. As for the biogeography of plants and animals, the processes of dispersal and selection by environmental conditions are central to the formation of variation in the spatial and temporal distribution of microbes. Recent molecular genetic evidence has shown that microbial communities vary by habitat, physical or chemical conditions, and seasons, indicating that selection is indeed important in shaping the biogeography of microbes. The state of the art in microbial biogeography lies in further unraveling the importance of dispersal and the conditions under which different processes are more likely to influence microbial community composition. Microbial biogeography provides a useful framework for understanding the overall ecology of micro‐organisms and the factors that control their functions in the natural environment.
Value Added
Authors: Michael Wernerheim C.
Published: March 2017

Value added is a measure of the production that occurs within an industry during a given period in a country or region. As such, it bears a close relationship with the gross domestic product (GDP). In GDP, only
final
purchases of goods and services are measured. However, in many cases firms produce an
intermediate
good or service that other businesses use as an input. Value added is designed to eliminate double‐counting of the goods and services produced by one industry and then resold as intermediate inputs to another industry. In order not to double‐count intermediate inputs in GDP, the national accounts credits each business only with the value it “adds” to production. The value added (or production) of each firm in each industry may thus be aggregated to provide an instrument for measuring the magnitude and composition of the output (GDP) of the economy as a whole.
Consumption
Authors: Mansvelt Juliana
Published: March 2017

Consumption involves those social relationships, discourses, and practices which focus on the sale, acquisition, use, and disposal of commodities. Consumption has a critical role in the maintenance of everyday life, in the formation of economy and society, and in the creation of people and place identities. Geographical study of consumption developed rapidly from the 1980s and geographers drawing on a number of theoretical perspectives have revealed how places are made meaningful for consumers and the ways in which consumption as a meaningful social practice is shaped in place. By studying sites of consumption, the role of consumption in commodity chains and networks, and the function of consumer practice in shaping sociality and identity, geographers have also provided important insights into the operation of power. In recent years attention has turned to matters of wasting and sustainability and the role of consumption in securing alternative futures.
Confidentiality
Authors: Duckham Matt
Published: March 2017

Confidentiality is concerned with protecting the privacy of information about an individual. Information privacy is defined as the “claim of individuals, groups, or institutions to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about them is communicated to others.” Location privacy is a special case of information privacy, concerned with the privacy of information about an individual's location. There are at least five different types of negative effects on individuals and society that are associated with a lack of information privacy. To combat these effects, two main classes of mechanisms exist for information privacy protection: regulation and information hiding technologies.
Emerging Market:
S
outhern Corporation
Authors: Carmody Pádraig , Brennan Louis
Published: March 2017

Traditionally foreign direct investment has primarily flowed between developed country markets and also from them to the countries of the Global South. However, with rapid economic growth and structural transformation in some southern countries it is now increasingly flowing south‐south and south‐north. The logic of these flows is sometimes different from the more traditional one as they are often brand and knowledge seeking, and the fact that many of the largest corporations originating from China are state‐owned gives them a different strategic impetus.
Public Policy
Authors: Ward Kevin
Published: March 2017

Public policy is government policy in a number of areas and is generally understood to be in the public good. There are many areas of public policy including crime, education, environment, housing, and transport. Increasingly, governments work with others in the naming, design, delivery, monitoring, and evaluation of policies, such as representatives of business or a community, often through some sort of partnership arrangement. The role of consultancies in all aspects of public policy has grown in recent years. More generally, public policy is the outcome of a broader set of arrangements, contestations, and negotiations involving a range of stakeholders.
Polycentricity
Authors: Vandermotten Christian
Published: March 2017

Polycentricity is a concept designating an equilibrated urban system, in opposition to monocentricity. Polycentrism implies a more normative meaning: policies favoring more polycentricity. The term can be used at different scales, and the measures of polycentricity remain strongly dependent on the scales and territorial frameworks used. Even if the advantages of more polycentricity are empirically weakly founded, polycentrism is generally promoted by the planning and regional development authorities, in particular at a European level.
Spatial Modeling:
V
oronoi Diagrams
Authors: Gold Christopher
Published: March 2017

Voronoi diagrams, and their duals, Delaunay triangulations, are spatial models that adapt to the distribution of the data. They have been rediscovered many times, are used in many disciplines, dimensions, and metrics, and are widely studied in computational geometry. This entry outlines the concepts, properties, and some basic construction algorithms for various types, together with a wide selection of applications in the geosciences.
States and Development
Authors: Carmody Pádraig
Published: March 2017

The role of the state and the relationship it has, or should have, with the market is probably still the foremost question in international development. Both “state” and “development” are contested and unsettled terms which have different connotations and meanings depending on how they are deployed. Rather than attempting to definitively define them, this entry provides overviews of how the terms are used contextually, different theories of the role of the state in development and how these have evolved through time, and what some of the most important axes of relations between the notions of states and development are and have been.
Export Processing Zones
Authors: Arnold Dennis
Published: March 2017

Export processing zones (EPZ) are spatially delimited areas in which manufacturers produce goods that are largely aimed for export markets. The global trade and investment context from which assembly‐based EPZs emerged has changed significantly in recent years, yet the number of zones continues to expand. EPZs act as territorial frontlines of economic growth and liberalization, and continue to be associated with labor rights violations, environmental degradation, land confiscation, and gendered violence. The forms of accumulation they enable stimulate processes of spatial and economic reorganization that extend beyond the zones, making these sites paradigmatic for studies of globalization.
Natural Resources and Human Conflict
Authors: Billon Philippe Le
Published: March 2017

Natural resources often appear in accounts of human conflicts, ranging from international “oil wars” to neighborhood disputes over water rights. Explanations of resource‐related conflicts include neo‐Malthusian struggles over scarce resources, Hobbesian conflicts driven by rational individualism in the absence of authority, opportunistic belligerency arising from resource opportunities, and a deepening of historical identity struggles through resource conflicts. Political ecology approaches to resource‐related conflicts seek to account for uneven power relations around natural resources, and to situate these conflicts within their specific historical and broader political economy contexts.
Indigenous Technical Knowledge
Authors: Goldman Mara J. , Lovell Eric
Published: March 2017

Indigenous technical knowledge (ITK) refers to knowledge about the local environment that is produced, held, and used by indigenous peoples and communities. The acknowledgment of ITK challenges the dominance of Western science, recognizes the plurality of knowledge claims, and provides indigenous peoples with representation on resource management issues that affect their lives. However, complex issues remain – political, ethical, epistemological, methodological, and ontological – regarding how ITK should be defined, accessed, and handled, and how it may be brought into conversation with Western science. While ITK is commonly defined as being ontologically and epistemologically distinct from Western scientific knowledge, many assumed differences have been questioned as Western science itself has been exposed as situated and performative. Geographers have entered the debate as both proponents and critics, highlighting the situated and processual nature of all knowledge production – indigenous and Western scientific– and the links between ITK and broader political economic processes.
Postdevelopment
Authors: Simon David
Published: March 2017

Postdevelopment encapsulates poststructuralist critiques of conventional or mainstream development approaches as they have evolved since World War II. These are perceived variously as misguided, inappropriate, often deleterious rather than beneficial and driven by donor and capitalist self‐interest rather than altruism. There is, however, considerable diversity in how postdevelopment itself is understood and deployed, not least in relation to antidevelopment. For some, postdevelopment constitutes principally critique; for others, both critiques and alternative visions; for others still, the two terms are effectively synonymous. The most useful distinction is to restrict antidevelopment to the critiques of conventional development, the sense in which it was originally deployed, with postdevelopment addressing alternative, more appropriate envisionings and agendas.
Buffers
Authors: Weber Joe
Published: March 2017

Buffers refer to spaces between objects or areas or within a specified distance of an object or place. They appear in a variety of contexts, including vector applications in geographic information systems (GIS), in which they are used to demarcate spaces within particular distances of features, and in political geography, urban planning, and conservation to separate incompatible areas. The meaning and use of the concept can vary significantly among these applications.
Petrocapitalism
Authors: Huber Matthew T.
Published: March 2017

This entry attempts to explain different ways to think about the relationship between oil and capitalist economies – or, what has been called “petrocapitalism.” It first reviews the initial usage of the term in reference to specific forms of accumulation tied up in extraction, state power, violence, and environmental degradation. Second, it reviews more recent attempts to come to terms with the centrality of petroleum products to the reproduction of global capitalism more broadly. While a focus on extraction yields a focused discussion of the politics of oil, consumptive petrocapitalism presents a much more dispersed understanding of oil's role in shaping politics more broadly. The entry concludes with a brief discussion of the prospects of moving beyond petrocapitalism.
Indigenous Health
Authors: Richmond Chantelle A.M.
Published: March 2017

Indigenous health can be considered from both a local and a global vantage point, with attention to topics including indigenous knowledge systems, indigenous health concepts, environmental dispossession, and patterns of indigenous health. Recent geographical research examines the concepts of decolonizing methodologies and environmental repossession, and the ways in which researchers may draw from such approaches to work with indigenous communities to improve community health.
Soil Mass Balance
Authors: Yoo Kyungsoo
Published: March 2017

Soils form at the intersection of the lithosphere, biosphere, atmosphere, and hydrosphere and thus are the location where the fluxes of minerals, water and solutes, and organic matter occur. The directions and sizes of these fluxes, and their sensitivities to environmental forcings, determine the soil's mass and composition, as well as its temporal and spatial characteristics. The quantitative relationships between the material fluxes and the resulting composition of soils are the subject of soil mass balance analysis. Many key concepts of soil formation have been framed implicitly or explicitly based on these concepts. The geochemical, geomorphic, and carbon mass balances have played key roles in advancing our knowledge of the biogeochemical evolution of soils and soils' role in landscape evolution and the carbon cycle.
Soils of Tropical Landscapes
Authors: Buol S.W.
Published: March 2017

Soils in tropical latitudes are morphologically, chemically, and physically diverse. The one property that distinguishes them from soils in temperate latitudes is their near uniform temperatures throughout the year. Many soils, primarily in the interiors of Africa and South America, are formed in geologic materials that have been exposed to weathering during several cycles of erosion and deposition for countless ages. Such highly weathered materials consist primarily of iron and aluminum oxides and quartz, and are nearly devoid of weatherable minerals. Soils formed in these materials are almost level to rolling landscapes and acquire few morphological and chemical alterations attributable to factors of soil formation commonly observed in temperate latitude soils. Most tropical soils are, however, on steeper, eroding landscapes, floodplains, and in more recent sediments containing appreciable quantities of weatherable minerals, tropical soils are very comparable to soils in temperate latitudes, except for the lack of seasonal temperature change.
Nonrepresentational Theory
Authors: Simpson Paul
Published: March 2017

Nonrepresentational theory has sought to transpose a range of key concerns for human geography into diversified registers of thought and action. In particular, themes around process, subjectification, affect, materiality, and the ethico‐political are explored. A variety of critiques of nonrepresentational theory include its limited attentiveness to issues of identity and social difference, the status it gives to human agency in its focus on the more‐than human, and its political orientation.
Permafrost: Definition and Extent
Authors: Dobiński Wojciech
Published: March 2017

Permafrost is a rock or soil the temperature of which is ≤0°C for at least two consecutive years. It is formed as a result of a freezing climate. It occurs at all latitudes around the world in continuous, discontinuous, sporadic, and isolated patches and covers more than 36 × 10
6
km
2
. It is invisible and separated from the surface by an active layer from zero to several meters thick. The Arctic permafrost is connected with colder weather resulting from the increase of latitude. In the Northern Hemisphere it covers especially: Canada, Alaska, and Siberia, with a depth reaching up to 1500 m. Mountain permafrost begins at an altitude of 500 m above sea level (a.s.l.) and reaches up to an altitude of 8848 m in the Himalayas. On the Southern Hemisphere it covers Antarctica and the mountain range of the Andes, about 13.5 × 10
6
km
2
in total. It also occurs in space.
Rural Society in theGlobalNorth
Authors: Butler Harrington Lisa Mathis
Published: March 2017

Rural society is highly varied across the world's most economically developed countries, or “Global North,” as well as across the world as a whole. Aspects of rural society include numbers and densities of rural residents, natural resources, and related livelihoods as well as economic characteristics, demographic characteristics, cultural practices, religious and political tendencies, and sense of place. In addition to agriculture, people living in rural places may be involved in fisheries, timber production, tourism, or mining and are often economically dependent on the related resources. In many parts of the Global North, rural populations have undergone change, in some cases with declines in populations overall, shifts in age distributions, or growth in numbers of retiree residents. Although rural populations have declined as a proportion of total populations in the north, rural society and environments are of importance in terms of providing resources and ecosystem services, including food and building materials to Earth's human populace.
Mental Health Geographies
Authors: McGeachan Cheryl
Published: March 2017

Mental health geography is a subfield of the discipline that takes as its focus the spatial and place‐related implications of both the experience of mental ill‐health and the provision of treatment facilities and programs. Interest in the subfield has grown since the 1970s, when the key focus was the changing locational associations between services and users. The landscape of mental health care was dramatically altered through the processes of deinstitutionalization, and with that change, attention turned to “post‐asylum geographies.” Attention has increasingly focused on new landscapes of care and the everyday experiential worlds of individuals encountering mental ill‐health.
Base Flow
Authors: Howard Douglas A.
Published: March 2017

The primary single component of the hydrological cycle that contributes water to sustainable stream flow is groundwater through base flow. Base flow is the groundwater contribution to stream flow. Base flow hydraulically connects the saturated zone to the stream channel, where groundwater intercepts the stream and contributes approximately 40% to its total annual discharge. Base flow's significant contribution to stream flow is evidenced in perennial and intermittent streams over long periods between storm events. Given minor contributions from the vadose zone and free‐fall precipitation on the stream hydrograph, volumetric and geochemical approaches to quantify base flow and runoff contributions have been developed.
Disease Diffusion
Authors: Exeter Daniel J. , Sabel Clive E.
Published: March 2017

The modeling of the spread and incidence of disease has been of longstanding interest to health geographers and epidemiologists. For a number of decades these concerns have been increasingly pursued through quantitative methods. Diffusion studies often focus on the modeling of transmission rates and the spatial spread of infectious disease in order to better understand the underlying processes and mechanisms of disease spread. Epidemiologists and statisticians often analyze the spread of disease in a temporal fashion, focusing on when a proportion of the susceptible population is likely to be in the “infective” stage. Other approaches, typically from a health geography perspective, have tended to look at the spatial extent and dynamics of disease.
Environment and Everyday Life
Authors: Loftus Alex
Published: March 2017

The relationship between the environment and everyday life is clearly important to how we understand environmental questions and also to environmental politics. Against most dominant understandings of the environment as something pristine and to be preserved, this entry explores the growing attention given to the environment as something lived in, played on, and sensed at a bodily and intimate level. After a brief review of the contributions of the environmental justice movement, which demonstrated the class and racial politics underlying the exposure of certain social groups to risky everyday environments, the entry then turns to alternative readings that have emphasized the importance of the “local” to an environmental politics. The penultimate section looks at work that sees a reformulation of environmental politics within a critique of everyday life and the entry concludes with a brief reflection on the directions that future work on the environment and everyday life might take.
Service‐Oriented Architecture
Authors: Yang Chaowei
Published: March 2017

Service‐oriented architecture (SOA) refers to a software development paradigm in which individual components of a system are treated as services that are combined to compose applications for scalability and manageability. Geographic information science (GIScience) software developers have adopted SOA to improve application development procedures in areas such as spatial data infrastructure, mashups, and geoportals. Recent advancements in spatial cloud computing, geoplatforms, volunteered geographic information (VGI), crowdsourcing, and the Internet of Things have also benefited from the adoption of SOA. This entry summarizes SOA's origins, history, enabling technologies, application examples, and new developments.
Habitus
Authors: Lusis Tom
Published: March 2017

At the time of his death on January 23, 2002, Pierre Bourdieu was considered by many to be the most influential intellectual in France. One of Bourdieu's key theoretical ideas was habitus, a central component in his theory of an economy of practices that recognized how social conditions shape, influence, and inhibit individuals and social structures in society. Habitus is a system of lasting, transposable dispositions that integrate past experiences and function as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions. These dispositions are shaped by social conditions (e.g., family background, employment, education) and are socially reproduced. Although they may be long‐lasting, these dispositions are not unchangeable, and can be eroded, modified, or even reversed through pedagogic effort, new experiences, education, or training.
Dispersal, Diffusion, and Migration
Authors: Greene D.F. , McCavour M.J.
Published: March 2017

The dispersal of plants and animals elicited minimal interest from ecologists and biogeographers until the last few decades when it took a central role in applied issues such as alien invasions or assisted migration in response to rapid climate change. The focus of this entry is on long distance dispersal and its role in diffusion and migration, with a particular emphasis on plants. Additionally, we discuss the surprising ecological conclusions produced by the recent literature on migration during the early Holocene.
Ground‐BasedLiDAR
Authors: Wang Ruisheng
Published: March 2017

This entry provides a brief overview of ground‐based LiDAR. Two different working modes of ground‐based LiDAR, stationary scanning and dynamic scanning, are discussed. System components and applications of ground‐based LiDAR are presented. Emphasis is placed on mobile LiDAR for large‐scale applications, such as road infrastructure mapping and monitoring as well as urban modeling.
Ethnobotany
Authors: Voeks Robert
Published: March 2017

Ethnobotany is the study of the dynamic relationship between plants and people. Considerable ethnobotanical inquiry focuses on the search for commercially valuable botanical products, especially medicines, but the field is becoming increasingly conceptual and problem oriented. Researchers explore the processes of crop domestication and diffusion, as well as indigenous plant‐naming systems. They investigate the strategies employed by rural subsistence societies, past and present, to manage plant species, and whether these actions are environmentally sustainable. Ethnobotanical research is directed at the effects of globalization and urbanization on traditional ethnobotanical knowledge and use. This study includes cultural erosion and changing gender roles, as well as the economic and ecological impacts of commercial non‐timber forest product harvest.
Climate Change Communication
Authors: Moser Susanne C.
Published: March 2017

Effective climate change communication is a central concern for geographers and others wishing to convey the science and impacts of climate change to lay publics, policymakers, and managers, and to engage in meaningful discourse on response options. The interdisciplinary field of climate change communication has grown rapidly since the early 2000s, with major research foci on messaging, language, and imagery; messengers; communication channels; the media; and audience segmentation. As the science of climate change moved its primary focus from detection and attribution of observed changes to improvements in climate models, to climate change impacts, vulnerabilities, and responses options, the foci in communication shifted. While the concerns early on were on conveying the physical science of climate change, related uncertainties, and mitigation options, more recent emphasis is on engaging the public on impacts and adaptation. The widening disconnect between the growing scientific consensus on the reality, human causation, and urgency of climate change on the one hand and the lagging societal response on the other remains a persistent challenge for climate change communication, particularly in North America and Australia.
Gentrification
Authors: Kayzar Brenda , Derickson Kate
Published: March 2017

Gentrification is the process whereby lower‐income residents and households are displaced as higher‐income households purchase and rehabilitate inner‐city residences. The process can also be found in commercial real estate, with lower order businesses being displaced as neighborhoods change. The process of class‐based displacement and neighborhood change has been studied using a variety of different methods focusing on a mix of actors and structural dynamics, often coming to competing conclusions and explanations. Of late, scholars have turned their attention beyond the ways residents are displaced, to broader questions of how they are enabled or constrained from shaping the city more broadly.
Digital Soil Mapping and Pedometrics
Authors: Miller Bradley A.
Published: March 2017

Digital soil mapping utilizes computer analysis and digital data to create a soil map. This exciting field provides the opportunity for employing new data and developing new techniques to create better soil maps, and to do so more efficiently. Although digital soil mapping often relies on concepts developed from traditional soil mapping, it is distinguished by the quantitative nature of the data and the analysis processes employed to generate the map. Digital soil maps are critical resources for precision agriculture and land‐use and conservation planning, as well as for environmental modeling. Pedometrics is a quantitative and statistical form of pedology. Both the quantitative basis of digital soil mapping and the importance of soil geography to pedology make digital soil mapping closely related to pedometrics. However, in the dynamic and diverse field of soil science, these terms are not necessarily synonymous, because not all techniques for digital soil mapping are considered to be a part of the field of pedometrics.
Soils and Weathering
Authors: Kovács János , Czigány Szabolcs
Published: March 2017

Weathering of rock and regolith involves physical, chemical, and/or biological processes. Physical weathering is the breakup and disintegration of rocks and minerals into smaller pieces. Chemical weathering is the decomposition of materials by a series of chemical reactions, resulting in different minerals and compounds, all of which are more geochemically stable in the near‐surface environment. Living organisms can cause and impact both physical and chemical weathering. Weathering of bedrock is one way that loose material at the Earth's surface (regolith) can form. Soils form in regolith. They support plant life and include organic material, water, and air.
Local Development
Authors: Hadjimichalis Costis
Published: March 2017

Local development is an explicitly social and territorial approach to development including not only economic aspects but also employment creation, poverty reduction, quality of life, and environmental sustainability. It is associated with the concept of endogenous growth and has been theoretically developed since the late 1970s. A wide range of local development projects exist worldwide implemented by local authorities, social movements, central states, and supranational organizations.
Logistics
Authors: Hesse Markus
Published: March 2017

Logistics includes the process of planning, implementing, and controlling the efficient, cost‐effective, and synchronized flow and storage of raw materials, inventory, finished goods, and related information, from point of origin to point of consumption and vice versa (as it concerns data, vessels, reverse logistics). While it initially emerged from the preparation and organization of military operations, logistics is now used to optimize issues as diverse and complex as corporate management, global trade, and a broad range of transport operations. Since logistics can be considered as the art of governing time–space relationships, it helps in exerting control over both flows and territories. Logistics is thus essential for geography, and it is also highly political.
Tourism
Authors: Olsen Daniel H. , Timothy Dallen J.
Published: March 2017

Tourism involves the temporary movement of people outside their usual places of residence from one area of the Earth to another. While tourism has existed for centuries, modern‐day tourism has become an increasingly important component of national and regional economies. Although tourism has seemingly not been fully embraced by the discipline as a whole, many geographers have actively examined it from various perspectives, particularly with regards to the spatial complexities of tourism, tourism and human–environment relationships, and critical geographies of tourism. As global tourism continues to grow, geographers are well situated to continue their contributions in understanding this far‐reaching phenomenon.
Inequality
Authors: Webber Michael
Published: March 2017

Inequality in geography refers to differences in wellbeing, health, income, wealth, or social status. There is a huge variety of indicators of these variables and of measures of inequality in them. This variety, together with political interests in the outcomes of studies of inequality, means that much research about inequality is highly disputed. At a global level, income inequality between individuals is high but has been stable in the past 20 years or so. Income inequality has been rising in most countries in the last 20–30 years. There are generally larger inequalities of wealth than of income. In political economic geography, inequalities in income and wealth are understood to reflect inequalities in holdings of assets (such as land and capital) and unequal treatment of people within labor markets. There is much debate about the social significance of inequality, some of which can be summarized in the question: how much inequality is desirable?
Soil Biology and Organisms
Authors: Coleman David C.
Published: March 2017

Soils are a haven for many phyla of countless numbers of microbes and fauna. The trophic (feeding) interactions between them provide much of the ecological stability of soil systems. Within the web of soil fauna, interactions occur via numerous biogeochemical cycles of the major nutrients, including carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur. These cycles are in turn influenced by aboveground and belowground interactions of plants and biota. Recent studies point to the considerable positive effects of the diversity of the soil fauna on rates of decomposition in a wide range of ecosystems worldwide. Awareness of soil biodiversity provides additional support for the influence of soil microbes and fauna on enhancing soil quality and supporting the recycling of nutrients in soils.
Spiritual Geographies
Authors: Maddrell Avril
Published: March 2017

Spiritual geographies address the sites and spatial practices associated with the nonmaterial, non‐ or more‐than‐representational, and posthuman arena that shapes the beliefs, practices, and identities of many of the world's population. A growing body of geographical work demonstrates the insight to be gained from studying the everyday, embedded, embodied, and occasionally extraordinary experiences stemming from a range of spiritual beliefs and practices, which may or may not be associated with institutionalized religion.
Postsocialist and Post‐Soviet Geography
Authors: Kolosov Vladimir
Published: March 2017

Although it is hardly possible to speak about a specific “postsocialist” geography, it still has some common features inherited from the socialist past, particularly in the institutional structure. Its current development is characterized by internationalization and Europeanization. Some common themes and shifts in focus can be distinguished. In postsocialist countries Russian geography has a place apart because of the size of the country and a relatively large number of geographical institutions, the duration of the socialist period, and specific academic legacy.
Cultures of Nature
Authors: Head Lesley
Published: March 2017

Geographers (both physical and human) have long been fascinated by how people relate to their environment, but have often taken the underlying concepts used to understand these relations for granted. Since the mid‐1990s a particular body of scholarship has challenged these taken‐for‐granted concepts. Research into “cultures of nature” analyzes culturally specific understandings of nature, in the process revealing that what we consider to be “natural,” and how we value it, varies culturally. This scholarship is best‐known for fascinating examples including the critique of the wilderness idea, indigenous understandings of landscape, and the examination of boundary‐making practices, both material (e.g., national parks) and conceptual (e.g., the dualism of “native versus invasive” species). There are strong complementarities between cultures of nature research in human geography, and the empirical evidence of human‐environment embeddedness in physical geography and archaeology. Why does this work matter? It matters because the way we think about nature becomes embedded in legislation and institutions that make a difference on the ground, and because the challenges of a world undergoing anthropogenic climate change demand new ways of thinking about human–environment relations.
Climate Change, Concept of
Authors: Hulme Mike
Published: March 2017

Like all powerful ideas, climate change can be deceptively simple to define and yet subject to a multiplicity of cultural meanings and technical interpretations. Most cultures have evolved mythological accounts to explain the vicissitudes of climate, while the newly quantitative climatologists from the nineteenth century onwards developed various statistical definitions of climatic change. But since the 1980s, and emerging out of Western scientific culture, the idea of climate change took on new meaning. Rather than a sign of moral judgment by the gods or a change in the statistics of local or regional weather, climate change came to stand for a more nebulous idea – the growing influence of human actions on physical processes operating at a global scale. In the early decades of the twenty‐first century, climate change has become an idea that offers new imaginaries, a new language and new institutions through which the complexities, interdependencies, and dilemmas of human life are acted out.
Open Geospatial Consortium standards
Authors: Reichardt Mark
Published: March 2017

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international voluntary consensus standards organization founded in 1994. In the OGC, hundreds of commercial, governmental, nonprofit, and research organizations worldwide collaborate in an open consensus process to develop and promote the implementation of open standards for geospatial content and services, geographic information system (GIS) data processing, and GIS data sharing. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that “geo‐enable” apps on mobile devices, location‐based services, the Internet of Things, and mainstream web applications. OGC standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled.
Environment and Law
Authors: Correia David
Published: March 2017

Law works to make sense of the world, translating the social and nonhuman world into legible forms and stable categories. The categorical logics of law reduce the complexity of nature and society into discrete juridicial categories or objects of interest. Making nature legible reflects a central epistemological effect of law. A shift from the complexity of nature to the ordered legibility of environment is perhaps law's most important accomplishment. Environment in this sense is made legible to and by the state, courts, and social institutions. But nature is unruly. Law's ability to resolve nature's complexity is thus always partial and incomplete.
Environmental Determinism
Authors: Johnston Tom
Published: March 2017

Environmental determinism, a concept we can trace to Greek and Arabic scholars, rests on the idea that the environment shapes the course of human development across various domains and at scales ranging from the individual to societies. It also figured prominently in the work of many Enlightenment‐era scholars including but not limited to Machiavelli and Montesquieu. During the early part of the twentieth century environmental determinism held a central if not dominant position within geography. Although many geographers accepted its central tenants, the concept is most closely associated with the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel and with two Americans who studied under Ratzel, Ellen Churchill Semple, and Ellsworth Huntington. Environmental determinism also held a central place in anthropological theory and has been embraced, although not so vigorously as in geography and anthropology, by several other social science disciplines and, perhaps obliquely, in the work of such prominent historians as Arnold Toynbee. Long abandoned by most geographers, environmental control as an organizing principle has been employed and popularized in development studies, mainly by scholars situated outside geography, a development that has attracted some criticism.
Polar Climates
Authors: Barry Roger G.
Published: March 2017

The Arctic is a sea ice‐covered ocean largely surrounded by the northern continents, that are snow‐free in summer. Antarctica is a high ice plateau surrounded by seasonally ice‐covered ocean. Both regions experience winter night and summer day, but temperatures in Antarctica are generally well below freezing year‐round, while in the Arctic in summer they are close to zero over the ocean and around 5–10°C inland. Both regions are dominated by a polar vortex in the troposphere around which the global westerly winds blow and extratropical cyclones and mesocyclones (polar lows) circle. There are three climatic regions on land: tundra, polar desert, and ice plateau. Over the open oceans there is a polar maritime climate, except in the presence of sea ice. Arctic temperatures have risen much faster than the global average over the past two decades (polar amplification) and the extent of arctic sea ice has rapidly diminished, especially in late summer. Similar changes are affecting the Antarctic Peninsula and seas to the west of it.
Environmental Performance, Practice, and Affect
Authors: Waitt Gordon
Published: March 2017

Environmental performance, practice and affect encompasses a field of geographical research that opens up ways of thinking about the relationship between humans and the environment that do not rely on understanding the nonhuman world as a universal objective reality. The environment is not assumed to be either static or pre‐existing. Instead, the environment is conceived as continually changing and emerging in and through a myriad of human and nonhuman agencies, working across different geographical scales, the past and present, here and elsewhere. Three themes are discussed that illustrate important implications for rethinking the environment from an inert backdrop to an active co‐constitutive of political processes: (i) embodied practices and performed natures; (ii) environmental politics as everyday practice; and (iii) rethinking environmentalism. This field is comprised of at least two sometimes discordant approaches of (i) poststructuralist feminisms and (ii) more‐than‐representational geographies.
Autobiography
Authors: Butz David
Published: March 2017

Autobiography is an epistemological orientation to the production and reception of communicative acts, in which knowledge claims are based on close correspondence between agents and objects of signification. Autobiography has a long history in geography, beginning with empiricist and humanist traditions, and taking new forms in response to feminist, poststructural, post‐phenomenological, and nonrepresentational theoretical and methodological innovations. Autobiographical communication is valued for its ability to convey everyday subjective experience, articulate emotion and affect, facilitate critical reflexivity, nurture relations of solidarity, and express the perspectives of groups whose voices are seldom heard. As a source of insight, autobiography shares many characteristics with other forms of qualitative methodology and qualitative data, including interviews, oral testimony, life history, ethnography, and autoethnography.
Industrial Agglomeration
Authors: Chen Ke
Published: March 2017

From the pre‐industrial time to the postmodern era, human society has seen spatially concentrated economic activities. Even though some industry development is driven by natural features, mechanisms related to the forces of agglomeration are more fundamental; these have also played an important role in the formation of urban areas and industrial structures. Businesses can benefit from locating close to each other, or take advantage of operating in urban areas. Whether it is the reduction in transportation cost or the gains of positive externality from technology spillover, industrial agglomeration has been a central theme in the field of economic geography.