Geography

Question

This piglix contains articles or sub-piglix about Geography

Answer 1

Map

A map is a symbolic depiction emphasizing relationships between elements of some space, such as objects, regions, or themes.

Many maps are static, fixed to paper or some other durable medium, while others are dynamic or interactive. Although most commonly used to depict geography, maps may represent any space, real or imagined, without regard to context or scale, such as in brain mapping, DNA mapping, or computer network topology mapping. The space being mapped may be two dimensional, such as the surface of the earth, three dimensional, such as the interior of the earth, or even more abstract spaces of any dimension, such as arise in modeling phenomena having many independent variables.

Although the earliest maps known are of the heavens, geographic maps of territory have a very long tradition and exist from ancient times. The word "map" comes from the medieval Latin Mappa mundi, wherein mappa meant napkin or cloth and mundi the world. Thus, "map" became the shortened term referring to a two-dimensional representation of the surface of the world.

Cartography or map-making is the study and practice of crafting representations of the Earth upon a flat surface (see History of cartography), and one who makes maps is called a cartographer.

Road maps are perhaps the most widely used maps today, and form a subset of navigational maps, which also include aeronautical and nautical charts, railroad network maps, and hiking and bicycling maps. In terms of quantity, the largest number of drawn map sheets is probably made up by local surveys, carried out by municipalities, utilities, tax assessors, emergency services providers, and other local agencies. Many national surveying projects have been carried out by the military, such as the British Ordnance Survey: a civilian government agency, internationally renowned for its comprehensively detailed work.

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Answer 2

Minimum bounding rectangle

The minimum bounding rectangle (MBR), also known as bounding box or envelope, is an expression of the maximum extents of a 2-dimensional object (e.g. point, line, polygon) or set of objects within its (or their) 2-D (x, y) coordinate system, in other words min(x), max(x), min(y), max(y). The MBR is a 2-dimensional case of the minimum bounding box.

MBRs are frequently used as an indication of the general position of a geographic feature or dataset, for either display, first-approximation spatial query, or spatial indexing purposes.

The degree to which an "overlapping rectangles" query based on MBRs will be satisfactory (in other words, produce a low number of "false positive" hits) will depend on the extent to which individual spatial objects occupy (fill) their associated MBR. If the MBR is full or nearly so (for example, a mapsheet aligned with axes of latitude and longitude will normally entirely fill its associated MBR in the same coordinate space), then the "overlapping rectangles" test will be entirely reliable for that and similar spatial objects. On the other hand, if the MBR describes a dataset consisting of a diagonal line, or a small number of disjunct points (patchy data), then most of the MBR will be empty and an "overlapping rectangles" test will produce a high number of false positives. One system that attempts to deal with this problem, particularly for patchy data, is c-squares.

MBRs are also an essential prerequisite for the R-tree method of spatial indexing.

Owing to their simplicity of expression and ease of use for searching, MBRs (frequently as "bounding box" or "bounding coordinates") are also commonly included in relevant standards for geospatial metadata, i.e. metadata that describes spatial (geographic) objects; examples include DCMI Box as an extension to the Dublin Core metadata scheme, "Bounding Coordinates" in the (U.S.) FGDC metadata standard, and "Geographic Bounding Box" in the (2003-current) ISO 19115 Metadata Standard for geographic information (ISO/TC 211). It is also (as "boundingBox") an element in Geography Markup Language (GML), that is utilised by a range of Web Service specifications from the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). In the ISO 19107 Spatial Schema (ISO/TC 211), MBR appears as the datatype GM_Envelope that is returned by the envelope() operation on the root class GM_Object.

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Answer 3

Motor Vehicle Use Map

Motor Vehicle Use Map is a legal tool for the USDA Forest Service to comply with and enforce the USDA's Travel Rule. While widely regarded as specific to off highway vehicles, it actually covers all public motorized use on all Forest Service roads and trails. The map itself is black and white, with little reference information, can be a variety of different dimensions, with different folding patterns, and is available in both hardcopy format at visitor centers and in digital (pdf) format on forest websites.

The Motor Vehicle Use Map is often referred to as MVUM.

The map is created by extracting spatial data from the agency's GIS depository (Enterprise Data Center, or EDC) which run's ESRI's SDE, and joining it with the tabular data that is stored in INFRA and extracted using I-Web.

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Answer 4

Mountain research

Mountain research or montology, traditionally also known as orology (from Greek oros ὄρος for 'mountain' and logos λόγος), is a field of research that regionally concentrates on the Earth's surface's part covered by mountain landscapes.

Different approaches have been developed to define mountainous areas. While some use an altitudinal difference of 300 m inside an area to define that zone as mountainous, others consider differences from 1000 m or more, depending on the areas' latitude. Additionally, some include steepness to define mountain regions, hence excluding high plateaus (e.g. the Andean Altiplano or the Tibetan Plateau), zones often seen to be mountainous. A more pragmatic but useful definition has been proposed by the Italian Statistics Office ISTAT, which classifies municipalities as mountainous

The United Nations Environmental Programme has produced a map of mountain areas worldwide using a combination of criteria, including regions with

In a broader sense, mountain research is considered any research in mountain regions: for instance disciplinary studies on Himalayan plants, Andean rocks, Alpine cities, or Carpathian people. It is comparable to research that concentrates on the Arctic and Antarctic (polar research) or coasts (coastal research).

In a narrower sense, mountain research focuses on mountain regions, their description and the explanation of the human-environment interaction in (positive) and the sustainable development of (normative) these areas. So-defined mountain research is situated at the nexus of natural sciences, social sciences and humanities. Drawing on Alexander von Humboldt's work in the Andean realm, mountain geography and ecology are considered core areas of study; nevertheless important contributions are coming from anthropology, geology, economics, history or spatial planning. In sum, a narrowly defined mountain research applies an interdisciplinary and integrative regional approach. Slaymaker summarizes:

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Answer 5

Population density

Population density (in agriculture: and standing crop) is a measurement of population per unit area or unit volume; it is a quantity of type number density. It is frequently applied to living organisms, and most of the time to humans. It is a key geographical term.

Population density is population divided by total land area or water volume, as appropriate.

Low densities may cause an extinction vortex and lead to further reduced fertility. This is called the Allee effect after the scientist who identified it. Examples of the causes in low population densities include:

For humans, population density is the number of people per unit of area, usually quoted per square kilometer or square mile (which may include or exclude, for example, areas of water or glaciers). Commonly this may be calculated for a county, city, country, another territory, or the entire world.

The world's population is around 7,000,000,000 and Earth's total area (including land and water) is 510,000,000 square kilometers (197,000,000 sq. mi.). Therefore, the worldwide human population density is around 7,000,000,000 ÷ 510,000,000 = 13.7 per km² (35 per sq. mi). If only the Earth's land area of 150,000,000 km² (58,000,000 sq. mi.) is taken into account, then human population density increases to 47 per km² (120 per sq. mile). This includes all continental and island land area, including Antarctica. If Antarctica is also excluded, then population density rises to over 50 people per km² (over 130 per sq. mile). However, over half of the Earth's land mass consists of areas inhospitable to human habitation, such as deserts and high mountains, and population tends to cluster around seaports and fresh-water sources. Thus, this number by itself does not give any helpful measurement of human population density.

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Answer 6

Primary care service area

Primary Care Service Areas are geographic areas that are self-sufficient markets of primary care. These areas are designed in a manner such that the majority of patients living in these areas use primary care services form within the area. This ensures that any geographic targeting of policies and resources reach the patients they are meant for. These geographies have been created in Australia, United States and Switzerland using big data and Geographic information systems. In Australia, while they have been developed for the state of New South Wales, they have not found application among policymakers, where, as of 2016 much larger geographies called Primary Health Networks are used for primary care management. However, they have found an especially wide audience amongst policymakers and researchers in the United States, where they were first developed. Thus for example the Health Resources and Services Administration uses them to designate areas of workforce shortage. Primary Care Service Areas are thus for example an appropriate geography for measuring primary care physician supply or geographic access to General practitioners.

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Answer 7

Natural landscape

A natural landscape is the original landscape that exists before it is acted upon by human culture. The natural landscape and the cultural landscape are separate parts of the landscape. However, in the twenty-first century landscapes that are totally untouched by human activity no longer exist, so that reference is sometimes now made to degrees of naturalness within a landscape.

In Silent Spring (1962) Rachel Carson describes a roadside verge as it used to look: "Along the roads, laurel, viburnum and alder, great ferns and wildflowers delighted the traveler’s eye through much of the year" and then how it looks now following the use of herbicides: "The roadsides, once so attractive, were now lined with browned and withered vegetation as though swept by fire". Even though the landscape before it is sprayed is biologically degraded, and may well contains alien species, the concept of what might constitute a natural landscape can still be deduced from the context.

The phrase "natural landscape" was first used in connection with landscape painting, and landscape gardening, to contrast a formal style with a more natural one, closer to nature. Alexander von Humboldt (1769 – 1859) was to further conceptualize this into the idea of a natural landscape separate from the cultural landscape. Then in 1908 geographer Otto Schlüter developed the terms original landscape (Urlandschaft) and its opposite cultural landscape (Kulturlandschaft) in an attempt to give the science of geography a subject matter that was different from the other sciences. An early use of the actual phrase "natural landscape" by a geographer can be found in Carl O. Sauer's paper "The Morphology of Landscape" (1925).

The concept of a natural landscape was first developed in connection with landscape painting, though the actual term itself was first used in relation to landscape gardening. In both cases it was used to contrast a formal style with a more natural one, that is closer to nature. Chunglin Kwa suggests, "that a seventeenth-century or early-eighteenth-century person could experience natural scenery ‘just like on a painting,’ and so, with or without the use of the word itself, designate it as a landscape." With regard to landscape gardening John Aikin, commented in 1794: "Whatever, therefore, there be of novelty in the singular scenery of an artificial garden, it is soon exhausted, whereas the infinite diversity of a natural landscape presents an inexhaustible flore of new forms". Writing in 1844 the prominent American landscape gardener Andrew Jackson Downing comments: "straight canals, round or oblong pieces of water, and all the regular forms of the geometric mode ... would evidently be in violent opposition to the whole character and expression of natural landscape".

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Answer 8

Plantmaps

Plantmaps.com is reference website that contains several interactive maps and tools to assist gardeners, botanists, farmers and horticulturalists. By entering a ZIP code, users can find the USDA hardiness zone, first and last frost dates, heat zones, drought conditions and annual climatology for their area.

built using the google maps api, plantmaps.com has the only fully interactive USDA hardiness zones map available on the web. In addition to plant hardiness zone map covering the continental United States, there are detailed interactive hardiness zone maps for each individual state. Plantmaps allows the user to locate their hardiness zone based on current US Postal Service ZIP codes. The ZIP code search will zoom to the coverage area of the selected ZIP code.

Plantmaps allows other websites to embed the USDA hardiness zone to ZIP code search tool in their websites by adding an iframe widget to their site, allowing visitors to easily find their local hardiness zone.

In response to the latency of the current official USDA hardiness zone map (produced in 1990 using data from 1974 to 1986), plantmaps has created a new hardiness zone map using historical data from the National Climatic Data Center that covers longer time periods and uses climate record data from as recently as 2009. There is an updated plantmaps hardiness zones map for each individual state in the Continental US.

Using long term climatology data from the National Climatology Data Center, Plantmaps has created interactive average annual first frost and average annual last frost date maps for each individual state. These maps break the average frost dates into 10 day/date increments.

Using shapefile data available from the National Drought Mitigation Center, plantmaps has created statewide interactive Drought Monitor Maps that are updated weekly with the latest drought monitor conditions throughout the US.

Plantmaps provides an interactive Palmer Drought Index map for each state. The interactive drought index maps use the latest data supplied by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and allows the map user to select and highlight the specific climate divisions in each state.

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Answer 9

Pan-region

A pan-region is a geographic region or state’s sphere of economic, political and cultural influence extending beyond that state's borders. For example, the pan-region of the United States of America (USA) includes regions both bordering the USA and its close neighbors including, Canada, Mexico, and many South American states.

The idea of pan-regions or spheres of economic and cultural influence was first developed by Karl Ernst Haushofer (8/27/1869-3/10/1946), a German General, geographer and geo-politician. Pan-regions contributed to Geopolitik or the German theories of foreign policy during the interwar period (1918–1939) or the time from the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II. Haushofer’s pan-regions divided the world under three supreme leading states in economy, politics and culture. Those three states included the USA who controlled North America and much of South America, Germany who controlled Europe, much of Africa and western Asia and Japan who controlled central, eastern, and the islands of southern Asia. These leading states could expect their regions to develop economic and political alliance with their leading state as well as yield to sanctions and major cultural designations.

Historically, the world was divided into three spheres of control, however after the end of World War II Germany and Japan’s control over their various regions have diminished with the success of other nations. For example, German control over Europe has suffered with the development of the European Union and emergence of other foreign powers. Japan also is beginning to lose economic dominance over its pan-region with the emergence of a thriving Chinese economy.

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Answer 10

Place identity

Place identity or place-based identity refers to a cluster of ideas about place and identity in the fields of geography, urban planning, urban design, landscape architecture, environmental psychology, ecocriticism and urban sociology/ecological sociology. It concerns the meaning and significance of places for their inhabitants and users, and how these meanings contribute to individuals' conceptualizations of self. In some ways it is related to the concepts of Place attachment and Sense of place.

Methodologies for understanding place identity primarily involve qualitative techniques, such as interviewing, participant observation, discourse analysis and mapping a range of physical elements. Some urban planners, urban designers and landscape architects use forms of deliberative planning, design charettes and participatory design with local communities as a way of working with place identity to transform existing places as well as create new ones. This kind of planning and design process is sometimes referred to as placemaking.

Place identity is sometimes called urban character, neighbourhood character or local character.

Place identity has become a significant issue in the last 25 years in urban planning and design. Related to the worldwide movement to protect places with heritage significance, concerns have arisen about the loss of individuality and distinctiveness between different places as an effect of cultural globalisation.

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