Maps & Geographic Data
This type of map shows specific locations and geographic features, like roads, rivers, and political boundaries.
What is a reference map?
This spatial concept refers to the movement of people, goods, or ideas between places.
What are flows?
This term describes using a resource at a rate that allows it to be naturally replenished.
What is sustainability?
This is the largest scale of analysis, examining patterns across the entire world.
What is the global scale?
This type of region is defined by one or more shared characteristics, such as language, climate, or government.
What is a formal region?
This type of map displays the spatial distribution of a variable, such as population density or election results.
What is a thematic map?
This concept describes the exact, fixed position of a place, typically given as coordinates.
What is absolute location?
This older theory claims that the physical environment directly controls, or determines, human behavior and cultural development.
What is environmental determinism?
This scale of analysis focuses on patterns within a single country.
What is the national scale?
This type of region is organized around a focal point and defined by a set of interactions or connections, like a newspaper's delivery area.
What is a functional region?
Because a curved Earth is being flattened onto paper, every map projection inevitably distorts one or more of these four properties.
What are shape, area, distance, and direction?
This term describes how interaction between two places decreases as the distance between them increases.
What is distance decay?
This theory replaced environmental determinism, arguing that the environment sets limits but humans can adapt to and modify it through culture and technology.
What is possibilism?
This is the smallest scale of analysis, examining a specific city, neighborhood, or community.
What is the local scale?
This type of region is defined by people's subjective perceptions of an area rather than official boundaries, such as "the South."
What is a perceptual (or vernacular) region?
This family of geospatial technologies includes GIS, satellite navigation systems, and remote sensing.
What is geospatial technology?
This term describes how technology has effectively shrunk the world by reducing the time it takes to interact across distance.
What is time-space compression?
Water, minerals, and forests are examples of these naturally occurring materials that humans rely on.
What are natural resources?
This scale of analysis groups together multiple nearby places that share common characteristics, such as Southeast Asia or the Middle East.
What is the regional scale?
Regional boundaries are rarely fixed; instead they are transitional and often have this quality, meaning groups may disagree about exactly where they lie.
What is contested (and overlapping)?
Field observations, travel narratives, personal interviews, and media reports are all examples of this kind of spatial information, distinct from numerical data.
What is qualitative (written-account) spatial data?
Unlike absolute location, this concept describes where a place is in relation to other places around it.
What is relative location?
This term refers to how humans use land for purposes such as agriculture, housing, or conservation.
What is land use?
Examining the same issue at global, national, and local scales reveals this about data and patterns.
What is variation in (or different interpretations of) patterns across scales?
Geographers apply regional analysis at these three scales.
What are local, national, and global scales?