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| What is geography: Greek Definition | The geo part means Earth and the graphy part comes from "graph," which means to write about. Literal definition of geography is essential to write about the Earth. |
| Purpose of geography | The first geographers studied places and regions for practical purposes. They were interested in exploring uncharted territories, mostly for trade. The first geographers included, Chinese, Greeks, and North Africans. They were also the first cartographers, making detailed maps and deriving measurements to describe the world as they knew it. |
| Eratosthenes | Head librarian at Alexandria during third century. BC. One of the world's first cartographers. Computed the Earth's circumference based on the sun's angle at the summer solstice and distance between the two Egyptian cities of Alexandria and Syene. His calculations were only about 109 miles too long. Responsible for coining the term geography. |
| Ptolemy | Published his Guide to Geography in second century AD which included rough maps of the landmasses as he understood them at the time, and a global grid system. Efforts represent a significant early contribution to both geography and the technical aspects of early cartography |
| Exploration | Begining in 1400 AD, knowledge of the globe began to expand rapidly as explorers traveled the Earth mapping landforms, climates, indigenous cultures, and the distribution of plants and animals. Some of the most influential explorers include Bartholomeu Dias, Christopher Columbus, and Ferdinand Magellan. Later important explorers include Alexander von Humboldt and the men of the Lewis and Clark expedition |
| George Perkins Marsh | Wrote Man and Nature or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action. He was an environmentalists that warned of willful destruction of the environment. (Things like desertification) |
| Carl Sauer | One of the first modern geographers, in 1925 he argued that cultural landscapes, the products of complex interactions between humans and their environments, should be fundamental focus of geographic inquiry. Proposed a method of landscape analysis that allowed geographers to understand and interpret the complex relationship between the humans and the environment. Argued that even landscapes appearing to be natural had experienced some form of alteration as a result of human activity |
| The Quantitative Revolution | The movement in the 1950s and 1960s among social scientists that stressed use of empirical measurements, hypothesis testing, programs to explain geographic patterns. Approach reflected influences of both modernist philosophy and technological innovation in the social sciences during this time. Many geographers credit it for bringing geography into the mainstream of modern science, while others criticize it for limiting the questions geographers ask and the methods they can use in their investigations. |
| Remote Sensing | Process of capturing images from Earth's surface from airborne platforms such as satellites or airplanes. Images generated can be digital or analog photographs and data can be collected from several bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. |
| GPS | An integrated network of satellites that orbit the earth, broadcasting location information to handheld receivers on Earth's surface. |
| GIS | A family of software programs that allow geographers to map, analyze, and model spatial data. Most use thematic layers, consisting of individual maps that contain specific features such as roads, stream networks, or elevation contours. |
| Divisions of Geography | Human geography, physical geography, and Earth system science. |
| Human Geography | Broadly defined as the study of human activities on the Earth's surface. Human geographers focus their work in more specific subdisciplines including population geography, cultural geography, economic geography, urban geography, agricultural geography, and political geography. |
| Physical geography | physical geographers study spatial characteristics of the Earth's physical and biological systems. Many natural scientists, including meteorologists, climatologists, ecologists, oceanographers, geologists, soil scientists, and hydrologists, study physical geography |
| Earth Science Systems | New, arose as a way to study interactions between physical systems on a global scales |
| Systematic Geography | study of the Earth's integrated systems as a whole, instead of focusing on particular processes in a single place. |
| Environmental Geography | Intersection of human and physical geography.Concerned with anything from the history of a given landscape to the effects of pollution on impoverished neighborhoods, to the creation of nature reserves for endangered species. |
| WD Pattinson's Four Traditions of Geography | Earth, culture, locaiton, area |
| Five themes of Geography | location, human environment interaction, regions, place, movement |
| Spatial perspective | framework that allows geographers to look at the earth in terms of the relationships between various places. |
| Geographic scale | a general concept that refers to a conceptual hierarchy of spaes, from small to large, that reflect actual levels of organisations of the real world |
| characteristic scale | small to large is the increase in size from the neighborhood to the urban area, to the metropolitan area, and finally to the region |
| Region as a concept | regionalizing allows geographers to group pieces of the Earth's surface area together according to certain similarities |
| regional geography | regions vary in size, a region may be an entire continent or a smaller area like Florida |
| Qualitative data | is associated with cultural or regional geography because they are more unique to and descriptive of particular places and processes |
| quantitative data | uses rigorous mathematical techniques important to economic, political, and population geography |
| Idiographic | refers to the features that are unique to a particular place or region, such as its history or ethnic composition |
| nomothetic | refers to concepts that are universally applicable |
| the Geoid | the shape of the earth. Not quite a sphere |
| projection | the process by which the three dimensional earth surface is transferred to a two-dimensional map |
| map distortion | all flat maps are distorted as a result of projecting a three dimensional suface on a two-dimensional surface. |
| The Mercator Projection | perserves accurate compass direction, but distorts area of landmasses, especially at the poles. |
| the Peters projection | shows more accurate sizes of all the world's landmasses |
| The Fuller Projection | maintains accurate size and shape of landmasses, but completely rearranges the directions |
| The Robinson Projection | does not maintain accurate area, shape, distance, or direction but minmizes errors in each. |
| Azimuthal Projections | when a flat piece of paper is placed on top of the globe and a light source projects the surrounding areas onto the map |
| Cartographic Scale | refers to the ratio between distance on a map and the actual size on the earth's surface |
| resolution | refers to a map's smalles disconcernable unit. (The smallest thing on the map) |
| Generalization | getting rid of the tiny pieces and only seeing the big picture |
| Refernce maps | are used to navigate between place and include topographic maps, atlases, road maps, or other navigational maps. |
| Thematic maps | display one or more variables across a specific sace such as population variables, voting patterns, or economic welfare |
| Isoline maps | maps that use lines to represent quantities of equal value |
| proportional symbols maps | flow lines often used to show movement of goods or people over space; lines get relatively thinner and thicker as values begin to shrink or expand. |
| dot density maps | when maps use dots to represent particular values |
| choropleth maps | colors or tonal shadings to represent categories of data for given geographic areas; countries, states, or counties most commonly use polygons. |
| cartograms | transform space so that the political unit, such as a state or country, with the greatest value for some type of data is represented by the largest relative area and all other polygons are represented proportionately to the largest polygon. |
