| A | B |
|---|
| Abiotic | Composed of nonliving or inorganic matter. |
| Atmosphere | The thin layer of gases surrounding Earth. |
| Biosphere | All living organisms on Earth, including plants and animals, as well as microorganisms. |
| Biotic | Composed of living organisms |
| Built landscape | An area of land represented by its features and patterns of human occupation and use of natural resources. |
| Climate | The long-term average weather condition at a particular location. |
| Concentration | The spread of something over a given area. |
| Connection | Relationships among people and objects across the barrier of space. |
| Conservation | The sustainable management of a natural resources. |
| Contagious diffusion | The rapid, widespread diffusions of a feature or trend throughout a population. |
| Cultural ecology | A geographic approach that emphasizes human-environment relationships. |
| Density | The frequency with which something exists within a given unit of area. |
| Diffusion | The process of spread of a feature or trend from one place to another over time. |
| Distance decay | The diminishing in importance and eventual disappearance of a phenomenon with increasing distance from its origin. |
| Distribution | The arrangement of something across Earth's surface. |
| Ecology | The scientific study of ecosystems. |
| Ecosystem | A group of living organisms and the abiotic spheres with which they interact. |
| Environmental determinism | A nineteenth- and early twentieth-century approach to the study of geography which argued that the general laws sought by human geographers could be found in the physical sciences. |
| Expansion diffusion | The spread of a feature from one place to another in a snowballing process; there are three types: contagious, hierarchical, and stimulus. |
| Friction of distance | Negative impact that distance has on spatial interaction, including communication and travel. |
| Globalization | Actions or processes that involve the entire world and result in making something worldwide in scope. |
| Hearth | The region from which innovative ideas originate. |
| Hierarchical diffusion | The spread of a feature or trend from one key person or node of authority or power to other persons or places. |
| Housing bubble | A rapid increase in the value of houses followed by a sharp decline in their value. |
| Hydrosphere | All of the water on and near Earth's surface. |
| Lithosphere | Earth's crust and a portion of upper mantle directly below the crust. |
| Natural landscape | Physical environment that has not been affected by human activities. |
| Network | A chain of communication that connects places. |
| Nonrenewable resource | Something produced in nature more slowly than it is consumed by humans. |
| Pattern | The geometric or regular arrangement of something in a study area. |
| Polder | Land created by the Dutch by draining water from an area. |
| Possibilism | The theory that the physical environment may set limits on human actions, but people have the ability to adjust to the physical environment and choose a course of action from many alternatives. |
| Preservation | The maintenance of resources in their present condition, with as little human impact as possible. |
| Relative distance | Length of space that includes the costs of overcoming the friction separating two places; often describes the amount of social, cultural, or economic connectivity between two places. |
| Relocation diffusion | The spread of a feature or trend through bodily movement of people from one place to another. |
| Renewable resource | Something produced in nature more rapidly than it is consumed by humans. |
| Resource | A substance in the environment that is useful to people, is economically and technologically feasible to access, and is socially acceptable to use. |
| Scale | Generally, the relationship between the portion of Earth being studied and Earth as a whole; specifically, the relationship between the size of an object on a map and the size of the actual feature on Earth's surface. |
| Space | The physical gap or interval between two objects. |
| Space-time compression | The reduction in the time it takes to diffuse something to a distant place as a result of improved communications and transportation systems. |
| Stimulus diffusion | The spread of an underlying principle even though a specific characteristic is rejected. |
| Sustainability | The use of Earth's renewable and nonrenewable natural resources in ways that do not constrain resource use in the future. |
| Transnational corporation | A company that conducts research, operates factories, and sells products in many countries, not just where its headquarters or shareholders are located. |
| Uneven development | The increasing gap in economic conditions between core and peripheral regions as a result of the globalization of the economy. |
