| A | B |
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| Human Geography | One of the two major divisions of geography; the spatial analysis of human population, its cultures, activities, and landscapes. |
| Globalization | The expansion of economic, political, and cultural processes to the point that they become global in scale and impact. |
| Physical Geography | One of the two major divisions of systematic geography; spatial analysis of the structure, processes, and location of the Earth's natural phenomena such as climate, soil, plants, animals, and topography. |
| Spatial Distribution | Physical location of geographic phenomena across space. |
| Pattern | The design of a spatial distribution. |
| Medical Geography | The study of health and disease within a geographic context and from a geographical perspective. |
| Pandemic | An outbreak of a disease that spreads worldwide. |
| Epidemic | Regional outbreak of a disease. |
| Spatial Perspective | Observing variations in geographic phenomena across space. |
| Location theory | A logical attempt to explain the locational pattern of an economic activity and the manner in which its producing areas are interrelated. |
| Sense of Place | State of mind derived through the infusion of a place with meaning and emotion by remembering important events that occurred in that place or by labeling a place with a certain character. |
| Perceptions of places | Belief or "understanding" about a place developed through books, movies, stories or pictures. |
| Movement | The mobility of people, goods and ideas across the surface of the planet. |
| Spatial Interaction | Movement between places. |
| Distances Accessibility | The degree of ease between the measured length between places. |
| Connectivity | The degree of direct linkage between one particular location and other locations in a transport network |
| Landscape | The overall appearance of an area. |
| Cultural Landscape | The visible imprint of human activity and culture on the landscape. |
| Sequent Occupance | The notion that successive societies leave their cultural imprints on a place, each contributing to the cumulative cultural landscape. |
| Cartography | The art and science of making maps, including data compilation, layout and design. |
| Reference Maps | Maps that show the absolute location of places and geographic features determined by a frame of reference, typically latitude and longitude. |
| Thematic Maps | Maps that tell stories, typically showing the degree of some attribute or the movement of a geographic phenomenon. |
| Absolute Location | The position or place of a certain item on the surface of the Earth as expressed in degrees, minutes and seconds of latitude and longitude. |
| Global Positioning System | Satellite-based system for determining the absolute location of places or geographic features. |
| Geocaching | A hunt for a cache, the Global Positioning System coordinates which are placed on the Internet by other geocachers. |
| Relative Location | The regional position or situation of a place relative to the position of other places. |
| Mental Maps | Image or picture of the way space is organized as determined by an individual's perception, impression and knowledge of that space. |
| Activity Spaces | The space within which daily activity occurs. |
| Generalized map | Information on the map is not specfic. |
| Remote Sensing | A method of collecting data or information through the use of instruments that are physically distant from the area or object of study. |
| Geographic Information Systems | A collection of computer hardware and software that permits spatial data to be collected, recorded, stored, retrieved, manipulated, analyzed and displayed to the user. |
| Rescale | Involvement of players at other scales to generate support for a position or an initiative. |
| Formal Region | A type of region marked by a certain degree of homogeneity in one or more phenomena |
| Functional Region | A region defined by the particular set of activities or interactions that occur within it. |
| Perceptual Region | A region that only exsists as a conceptualization or an idea and not as a physically demarcated entity. |
| Culture Complex | A related set of cultural traits. |
| Cultural Hearth | Heartland, source area, innovation center; place of origin of a major culture. |
| Culture Trait | A single element of normal practice in a culture. |
| Cultural Diffusion | The expansion and adoption of a cultural element, from its place of origin to a wider area. |
| Independent Invention | The term for the trait with many cultural hearths that developed independent of each other. |
| Time Distance Decay | The declining degree of acceptance of an idea or innovation with increasing time and distance from its point of origin or source. |
| Cultural Barrier | Prevailing cultural attitude rendering certain innovations, ideas or practices unacceptable or unadoptable in that particular culture. |
| Expansion Diffusion | The spread of an innovation or an idea through a population in an area in such a way that the number of those influenced grows continuously larger, resulting in an expanding area of dissemination. |
| Contagious Diffusion | The distance-controlled spreading of an idea, innovation, or some other item through a local population by contact from person to person. |
| Hierarchial Diffusion | A form of diffusion in which an idea or innovation spreads by passing first among the most connected places or peoples. |
| Stimulus Diffusion | A form of diffusion in which a cultural adaptation is created as a result of the introduction of a cultural trait from another place. |
| Relocation diffusion | Sequential diffusion process in which the items being diffused are transmitted by their carrier agents as they evacuate the old areas and relocate to the new ones. |
| Environmental determinism | The view that the natural environment has a controlling influence over various aspects of human life, including cultural development. |
| Isotherms | Line on a map connecting points of equal temperature values. |
| Possibilism | Geographic viewpoint that holds that human decision making is the crucial factor in cultural development. |
| Cultural Ecology | The multiple interaction and relationships between a culture and the natural environment |
| Political Ecology | An approach to studying nature-society relations that is concerned with the ways in which environmental issues both reflect and are the result of the political and socieconomic contexts in which they are situated. |
