Outline of geography

Nature of geography

Geography is

• an academic discipline - a body of knowledge given to − or received by − a disciple ; a branch or sphere of knowledge, or field of study, that an individual has chosen to specialize in. Modern geography is an all-encompassing discipline that seeks to understand the Earth and all of its human and natural complexities − not merely where objects are, but how they have changed and come to be. Geography has been called 'the world discipline'.
• a field of science - widely recognized category of specialized expertise within science, and typically embodies its own terminology and nomenclature. Such a field will usually be represented by one or more scientific journals, where peer reviewed research is published. There are many geography-related scientific journals.
• * a natural science - field of academic scholarship that explores aspects of natural environment.
• * a social science - field of academic scholarship that explores aspects of human society.
• an interdisciplinary field - a field that crosses traditional boundaries between academic disciplines or schools of thought, as new needs and professions have emerged. Many of the branches of physical geography are also branches of Earth science.

  Branches of geography

• human geography
• physical geography

• integrated geography
• geomatics
• regional geography

Physical geography

• Physical geography - examines the natural environment and how the climate, vegetation & life, soil, water, and landforms are produced and interact.

  Fields of physical geography

• Geomorphology - study of landforms and the processes that them, and more broadly, of the processes controlling the topography of any planet. Seeks to understand why landscapes look the way they do, to understand landform history and dynamics, and to predict future changes through a combination of field observation, physical experiment, and numerical modeling.
• Hydrology - study of the movement, distribution, and quality of water throughout the Earth, including the hydrologic cycle, water resources and environmental watershed sustainability.
• * Glaciology - study of glaciers, or more generally ice and natural phenomena that involve ice.
• * Oceanography - studies a wide range of topics pertaining to oceans, including marine organisms and ecosystem dynamics; ocean currents, waves, and geophysical fluid dynamics; plate tectonics and the geology of the sea floor; and fluxes of various chemical substances and physical properties within the ocean and across its boundaries.
• Biogeography - study of the distribution of species spatially and temporally. Over areal ecological changes, it is also tied to the concepts of species and their past, or present living 'refugium', their survival locales, or their interim living sites. It aims to reveal where organisms live, and at what abundance.
• Climatology - study of climate, scientifically defined as weather conditions averaged over a period of time.
• Meteorology is the interdisciplinary scientific study of the atmosphere that focuses on weather processes and short term forecasting.
• Pedology - study of soils in their natural environment that deals with pedogenesis, soil morphology, and soil classification.
• Palaeogeography - study of what the geography was in times past, most often concerning the physical landscape, but also the human or cultural environment.
• Coastal geography - study of the dynamic interface between the ocean and the land, incorporating both the physical geography and the human geography of the coast. It involves an understanding of coastal weathering processes, particularly wave action, sediment movement and weather, and also the ways in which humans interact with the coast.
• Quaternary science - focuses on the Quaternary period, which encompasses the last 2.6 million years, including the last ice age and the Holocene period.
• Landscape ecology - the relationship between spatial patterns of urban development and ecological processes on a multitude of landscape scales and organizational levels.

  Approaches of physical geography

• Quantitative geography - Quantitative research tools and methods applied to geography. See also the quantitative revolution.
• Systems approach -

  Human geography

• Human geography - one of the two main subfields of geography, it is the study of human use and understanding of the world and the processes which have affected it. Human geography broadly differs from physical geography in that it focuses on the built environment and how space is created, viewed, and managed by humans as well as the influence humans have on the space they occupy.

  Fields of human geography

• Cultural geography - study of cultural products and norms and their variations across and relations to spaces and places. It focuses on describing and analyzing the ways language, religion, economy, government and other cultural phenomena vary or remain constant, from one place to another and on explaining how humans function spatially.
• * Children's geographies - study of places and spaces of children's lives, characterized experientially, politically and ethically. Children's geographies rests on the idea that children as a social group share certain characteristics which are experientially, politically and ethically significant and which are worthy of study. The pluralisation in the title is intended to imply that children's lives will be markedly different in differing times and places and in differing circumstances such as gender, family, and class. The range of foci within children's geographies include:
• ** Children and the city
• ** Children and the countryside
• ** Children and technology
• ** Children and nature,
• ** Children and globalization
• ** Methodologies of researching children's worlds
• ** Ethics of researching children's worlds
• ** Otherness of childhood
• * Animal geographies - studies the spaces and places occupied by animals in human culture, because social life and space is heavily populated by animals of many differing kinds and in many differing ways. Another impetus that has influenced the development of the field are ecofeminist and other environmentalist viewpoints on nature-society relations.
• * Language geography - studies the geographic distribution of language or its constituent elements. There are two principal fields of study within the geography of language:
• *# Geography of languages - deals with the distribution through history and space of languages,
• *# Linguistic geography - deals with regional linguistic variations within languages.
• * Sexuality and space - encompasses all relationships and interactions between human sexuality, space, and place, including the geographies of LGBT residence, public sex environments, sites of queer resistance, global sexualities, sex tourism, the geographies of prostitution and adult entertainment, use of sexualised locations in the arts, and sexual citizenship.
• * Religion geography - study of the influence of geography, i.e. place and space, on religious belief.
• Development geography - study of the Earth's geography with reference to the standard of living and quality of life of its human inhabitants. Measures development by looking at economic, political and social factors, and seeks to understand both the geographical causes and consequences of varying development, in part by comparing More Economically Developed Countries with Less Economically Developed Countries.
• Economic geography - study of the location, distribution and spatial organization of economic activities across the world. Subjects of interest include but are not limited to the location of industries, economies of agglomeration, transportation, international trade and development, real estate, gentrification, ethnic economies, gendered economies, core-periphery theory, the economics of urban form, the relationship between the environment and the economy, and globalization.
• * Marketing geography - a discipline within marketing analysis which uses geolocation in the process of planning and implementation of marketing activities. It can be used in any aspect of the marketing mix – the product, price, promotion, or place.
• * Transportation geography - branch of economic geography that investigates spatial interactions between people, freight and information. It studies humans and their use of vehicles or other modes of traveling as well as how markets are serviced by flows of finished goods and raw materials.
• Health geography - application of geographical information, perspectives, and methods to the study of health, disease, and health care, to provide a spatial understanding of a population's health, the distribution of disease in an area, and the environment's effect on health and disease. It also deals with accessibility to health care and spatial distribution of health care providers.
• * Time geography - study of the temporal factor on spatial human activities within the following constraints:

1. Authority - limits of accessibility to certain places or domains placed on individuals by owners or authorities
2. Capability - limitations on the movement of individuals, based on their nature. For example, movement is restricted by biological factors, such as the need for food, drink, and sleep
3. Coupling - restraint of an individual, anchoring him or her to a location while interacting with other individuals in order to complete a task

• Historical geography - study of the human, physical, fictional, theoretical, and "real" geographies of the past, and seeks to determine how cultural features of various societies across the planet emerged and evolved, by understanding how a place or region changes through time, including how people have interacted with their environment and created the cultural landscape.
• Political geography - study of the spatially uneven outcomes of political processes and the ways in which political processes are themselves affected by spatial structures. Basically, the inter-relationships between people, state, and territory.
• * Electoral geography - study of the relationship between election results and the regions they affect, and of the effects of regional factors upon voting behavior.
• * Geopolitics - analysis of geography, history and social science with reference to spatial politics and patterns at various scales, ranging from the level of the state to international.
• * Strategic geography - concerned with the control of, or access to, spatial areas that affect the security and prosperity of nations.
• * Military geography - the application of geographic tools, information, and techniques to solve military problems in peacetime or war.
• Population geography - study of the ways in which spatial variations in the distribution, composition, migration, and growth of populations are related to the nature of places.
• Tourism geography - study of travel and tourism, as an industry and as a social and cultural activity, and their effect on places, including the environmental impact of tourism, the geographies of tourism and leisure economies, answering tourism industry and management concerns and the sociology of tourism and locations of tourism.
• Urban geography - the study of urban areas, in terms of concentration, infrastructure, economy, and environmental impacts.

  Approaches of human geography

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• Qualitative geography - qualitative research tools and methods applied to geography.

  Integrated geography

• Integrated geography - branch of geography that describes the spatial aspects of interactions between humans and the natural world. It requires an understanding of the dynamics of geology, meteorology, hydrology, biogeography, ecology, and geomorphology, as well as the ways in which human societies conceptualize the environment.

  Geomatics

• Geomatics - branch of geography and the discipline of gathering, storing, processing, and delivering geographic information, or spatially referenced information. It is a widespread interdisciplinary field that includes the tools and techniques used in land surveying, remote sensing, cartography, Geographic Information Systems, Global Navigation Satellite Systems, photogrammetry, and related forms of earth mapping.

  Fields contributing to geomatics

• Global navigation satellite systems represented by - Any system that uses satellite radio signals to provide autonomous geo-spatial positioning
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• Regional geography

Supercontinents

• Afro-Eurasia '
• Americas '
• Eurasia

  Continents

Subregions

Biogeographic regions

Biogeographic realm

• Nearctic 22.9 mil. km²
• Palearctic 54.1 mil. km²
• Afrotropic 22.1 mil. km²
• Indomalaya 7.5 mil. km²
• Australasia 7.7 mil. km². The northern boundary of this zone is known as the Wallace line.
• Neotropic 19.0 mil. km²
• Oceania 1.0 mil. km²
• Antarctic 0.3 mil. km².

  Ecoregions

Geography of the political divisions of the World

Other regions

• Atlantic World
• Bermuda Triangle
• Pacific Rim
• Pacific Ring of Fire

  History of geography

By period

• Ancient roads
• Ancient Greek geography
• Age of discovery
• Major explorations after the Age of Discovery
• Critical geography
• Environmental determinism

  By region

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  By subject

• Historical population of the world

  By field

• History of human geography
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• * History of cultural geography
• * History of economic geography
• * History of health geography
• * History of political geography
• ** History of demography
• History of physical geography
• * History of biogeography
• * History of climatology
• * History of meteorology
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• * History of geomorphology
• * History of hydrology
• ** History of oceanography
• * History of landscape ecology
• History of regional geography

  Elements of geography

Tasks and tools of geography

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• Types of geographic features

Location and place

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  Natural geographic features

Ecosystems

• Realm - broadest biogeographic division of the Earth's land surface, based on distributional patterns of terrestrial organisms.
• * Ecoprovince - biogeographic unit smaller than a realm that contains one or more ecoregions.
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  Natural landforms

Natural terrain feature types

• Natural body of water types

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• * Bodies of fresh water
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  Artificial geographic features

• * - rural settlement which is too small to be considered a village. Historically, when a hamlet became large enough to justify building a church, it was then classified as a village. One example of a hamlet is a small cluster of houses surrounding a mill.
• * - clustered human settlement or community, larger than a hamlet with the population ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand.
• * - human settlement larger than a village but smaller than a city. The size a settlement must be in order to be called a "town" varies considerably in different parts of the world, so that, for example, many American "small towns" seem to British people to be no more than villages, while many British "small towns" would qualify as cities in the United States.
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• * - relatively large and permanent settlement. In many regions, a city is distinguished from a town by attainment of designation according to law, for instance being required to obtain articles of incorporation or a royal charter.
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• ** - the leading city in its country or region, disproportionately larger than any others in the urban hierarchy.
• ** - very large city or urban area which is a significant economic, political and cultural center for a country or region, and an important hub for regional or international connections and communications.
• ** - region consisting of a densely populated urban core and its less-populated surrounding territories, sharing industry, infrastructure, and housing.
• ** - city that is deemed to be an important node in the global economic system. Globalization is largely created, facilitated and enacted in strategic geographic locales according to a hierarchy of importance to the operation of the global system of finance and trade.
• ** - chain of roughly adjacent metropolitan areas. An example is the huge metropolitan area along the eastern seaboard of the U.S. extending from Boston, Massachusetts through New York City; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Baltimore, Maryland and ending in Washington, D.C..
• ** - theoretical "continent city". The world does not have one yet. Will Europe become the first one?
• ** - theoretical "world city". Will the world ever become so urbanized as to be called this?
• Engineered construct - built feature of the landscape such as a highway, bridge, airport, railroad, building, dam, or reservoir. See also construction engineering and infrastructure.
• * Artificial landforms
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• * - place where airplanes can take off and land, including one or more runways and one or more passenger terminals.
• * - artificial channel that is constructed to convey water from one location to another.
• * - construction designed to break the force of the sea to provide calm water for boats or ships, or to prevent erosion of a coastal feature.
• * - structure built to span a valley, road, body of water, or other physical obstacle such as a canyon, for the purpose of providing passage over the obstacle.
• * - closed structure with walls and a roof.
• * - artificial waterway, often connecting one body of water with another.
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• * - structure placed across a flowing body of water to stop the flow, usually to use the water for irrigation or to generate electricity.
• ** - barrier of stone or earth used to hold back water and prevent flooding.
• *** - artificial slope or wall to regulate water levels, usually earthen and often parallel to the course of a river or the coast.
• * - place where agricultural activities take place, especially the growing of crops or the raising of livestock.
• * - harbor that has deliberately constructed breakwaters, sea walls, or jettys, or which was constructed by dredging.
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• Abstract geographic feature - does not exist physically in the real world, yet has a location by definition and may be displayed on maps.
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• ** - a designated territory created within a country for administrative or identification purposes. Examples of the types of country subdivisions:
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• * Cartographical feature - theoretical construct used specifically on maps that doesn't have any physical form apart from its location.
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  Geographic features that include the natural and artificial

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  Geography awards

• Persons influential in geography

Influential physical geographers

• Eratosthenes - who made the first known reliable estimation of the Earth's size. He is considered the father of geodesy.
• Ptolemy - who compiled Greek and Roman knowledge to produce the book Geographia.
• Abū Rayhān Bīrūnī - considered the father of geodesy.
• Ibn Sina - whose observations in Kitab Al-Shifa contributed to later formulations of the law of superposition and concept of uniformitarianism.
• Muhammad al-Idrisi - who drew the Tabula Rogeriana, the most accurate world map in pre-modern times.
• Piri Reis - whose Piri Reis map is the oldest surviving world map to include the Americas and possibly Antarctica
• Gerardus Mercator - an innovative cartographer and originator of the Mercator projection.
• Bernhardus Varenius - Wrote his important work "General Geography" - first overview of the geography, the foundation of modern geography.
• Mikhail Lomonosov - father of Russian geography and founded the study of glaciology.
• Alexander Von Humboldt - considered the father of modern geography. Published Kosmos and founded the study of biogeography.
• Arnold Henry Guyot - who noted the structure of glaciers and advanced the understanding of glacial motion, especially in fast ice flow.
• Louis Agassiz - the author of a glacial theory which disputed the notion of a steady-cooling Earth.
• Alfred Russel Wallace - founder of modern biogeography and the Wallace line.
• Vasily Dokuchaev - patriarch of Russian geography and founder of pedology.
• Wladimir Peter Köppen - developer of most important climate classification and founder of Paleoclimatology.
• William Morris Davis - father of American geography, founder of Geomorphology and developer of the geographical cycle theory.
• Walther Penck - proponent of the cycle of erosion and the simultaneous occurrence of uplift and denudation.
• Sir Ernest Shackleton - Antarctic explorer during the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration.
• Robert E. Horton - founder of modern hydrology and concepts such as infiltration capacity and overland flow.
• J Harlen Bretz - pioneer of research into the shaping of landscapes by catastrophic floods, most notably the Bretz floods.
• Willi Dansgaard - palaeoclimatologist and quaternary scientist, instrumental in the use of oxygen-isotope dating and co-identifier of Dansgaard-Oeschger events.
• Hans Oeschger - palaeoclimatologist and pioneer in ice core research, co-identifier of Dansgaard-Orschger events.
• Richard Chorley - a key contributor to the quantitative revolution and the use of systems theory in geography.
• Sir Nicholas Shackleton - who demonstrated that oscillations in climate over the past few million years could be correlated with variations in the orbital and positional relationship between the Earth and the Sun.
• Stefan Rahmstorf - professor of abrupt climate changes and author on theories of thermohaline dynamics.

  Influential human geographers

• Carl Ritter - considered to be one of the founding fathers of modern geography and first chair in geography at the Humboldt University of Berlin, also noted for his use of organic analogy in his works.
• Friedrich Ratzel - environmental determinist, invented the term Lebensraum
• Paul Vidal de la Blache - founder of the French School of geopolitics and possibilism.
• Sir Halford John Mackinder - author of The Geographical Pivot of History, co-founder of the London School of Economics, along with the Geographical Association.
• Carl O. Sauer - critic of environmental determinism and proponent of cultural ecology.
• Walter Christaller - economic geographer and developer of the central place theory.
• Richard Hartshorne - scholar of the history and philosophy of geography.
• Torsten Hägerstrand - critic of the quantitative revolution and regional science, noted figure in critical geography.
• Milton Santos winner of the Vautrin Lud prize in 1994, one of the most important geographers in South America.
• Waldo R. Tobler - developer of the First law of geography.
• Yi-Fu Tuan A Chinese-American geographer.
• David Harvey - world's most cited academic geographer and winner of the Lauréat Prix International de Géographie Vautrin Lud, also noted for his work in critical geography and critique of global capitalism.
• Evelyn Stokes. Professor of geography at the University of Waikato in New Zealand. Known for recognizing inequality with marginalized groups including women and Māori using geography.
• Allen J. Scott - winner of Vautrin Lud Prize in 2003 and the Anders Retzius Gold medal 2009; author of numerous books and papers on economic and urban geography, known for his work on regional development, new industrial spaces, agglomeration theory, global city-regions and the cultural economy.
• Edward Soja - noted for his work on regional development, planning and governance, along with coining the terms synekism and postmetropolis.
• Doreen Massey - key scholar in the space and places of globalization and its pluralities, winner of the Vautrin Lud Prize.
• Michael Watts, Class of 1963 Professor of Geography and Development Studies, University of California, Berkeley
• Nigel Thrift - developer of non-representational theory.
• Derek Gregory - famous for writing on the Israeli, U.S. and UK actions in the Middle East after 9/11, influenced by Edward Said and has contributed work on imagined geographies.
• Cindi Katz - who writes on social reproduction and the production of space. Writing on children's geographies, place and nature, everyday life and security.
• Gillian Rose - most famous for her critique: Feminism & Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge - which was one of the first moves towards a development of feminist geography.

  Geography educational frameworks

• # - a position or point that something occupies on the Earth's surface.
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• # :wikt:movement|movement -
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• The six "essential elements" identified by the Geography Education Standards Project, under which the National Geography Standards they developed are organized:
• # The World in spatial terms
• # Places and regions
• # Physical systems
• # Human systems
• # Environment and society
• # The uses of geography
• The three content areas of geography from the 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress :
• # Space and place
• # Environment and society
• # Spatial dynamics and connections