Outline of geography

Nature of geography

Geography as

• an academic discipline - a body of knowledge given to − or received by − a disciple ; a branch or sphere of knowledge, or field of study, that an individual has chosen to specialize in. Modern geography is an all-encompassing discipline that seeks to understand the Earth and its human and natural complexities − not merely where objects are, but how they have changed and come to be. Geography has been called 'the world discipline'.
• a field of science - widely recognized category of specialized expertise within science, and typically embodies its own terminology and nomenclature. This field will usually be represented by one or more scientific journals, where peer-reviewed research is published. There are many geography-related scientific journals.
• * a natural science - field of academic scholarship that explores aspects of the natural environment.
• * a social science - field of academic scholarship that explores aspects of human society.
• an interdisciplinary field - a field that crosses traditional boundaries between academic disciplines or schools of thought, as new needs and professions have emerged. Many of the branches of physical geography are also branches of Earth science

  Branches of geography

• human geography
• physical geography

• integrated geography
• technical geography
• regional geography

  Physical geography

• Physical geography - examines the natural environment and how the climate, vegetation and life, soil, water, and landforms are produced and interact.

  Fields of physical geography

• Geomorphology - study of landforms and the processes that them, and more broadly, of the processes controlling the topography of any planet. It seeks to understand why landscapes look the way they do, to understand landform history and dynamics, and to predict future changes through field observation, physical experiments, and numerical modeling.
• Hydrology - study water movement, distribution, and quality throughout the Earth, including the hydrologic cycle, water resources, and environmental watershed sustainability.
• * Glaciology - study of glaciers, or more generally ice and natural phenomena that involve ice.
• * Oceanography - studies a wide range of topics about oceans, including marine organisms and ecosystem dynamics; ocean currents, waves, and geophysical fluid dynamics; plate tectonics and the geology of the sea floor; and fluxes of various chemical substances and physical properties within the ocean and across its boundaries.
• Biogeography - study of species distribution spatially and temporally. Over areal ecological changes, it is also tied to the concepts of species and their past, or present living 'refugium', their survival locales, or their interim living sites. It aims to reveal where organisms live and at what abundance.
• Climatology - study of climate, scientifically defined as weather conditions averaged over a period of time.
• Meteorology is the interdisciplinary scientific study of the atmosphere that focuses on weather processes and short-term forecasting.
• Pedology - study of soils in their natural environment that deals with pedogenesis, soil morphology, and soil classification.
• Palaeogeography - study of what geography was in times past, most often concerning the physical landscape and the human or cultural environment.
• Coastal geography - study of the dynamic interface between the ocean and the land, incorporating both the physical geography and the human geography of the coast. It involves understanding coastal weathering processes, particularly wave action, sediment movement, and weather, as well as how humans interact with the coast.
• Quaternary science - focuses on the Quaternary period, which encompasses the last 2.6 million years, including the last ice age and the Holocene period.
• Landscape ecology - the relationship between spatial patterns of urban development and ecological processes on many landscape scales and organizational levels.

  Approaches of physical geography

• Quantitative geography - Quantitative research tools and methods applied to geography. See also the quantitative revolution.
• Systems approach -

  Human geography

• Human geography - one of the two main subfields of geography is the study of human use and understanding of the world and the processes that have affected it. Human geography broadly differs from physical geography in that it focuses on the built environment and how space is created, viewed, and managed by humans, as well as the influence humans have on the space they occupy.

  Fields of human geography

• Cultural geography - study of cultural products and norms and their variations across and relations to spaces and places. It focuses on describing and analyzing the ways language, religion, economy, government, and other cultural phenomena vary or remain constant from one place to another and on explaining how humans function spatially.
• * Children's geographies - study of places and spaces of children's lives, characterized experientially, politically and ethically. Children's geographies rest on the idea that children as a social group share certain characteristics that are experientially, politically, and ethically significant and worthy of study. The pluralization in the title is intended to imply that children's lives will be markedly different in differing times and places and in differing circumstances such as gender, family, and class. The range of foci within children's geographies includes:
• ** Children and the city
• ** Children and the countryside
• ** Children and technology
• ** Children and nature,
• ** Children and globalization
• ** Methodologies of researching children's worlds
• ** Ethics of researching children's worlds
• ** Otherness of childhood
• * Animal geographies - studies the spaces and places occupied by animals in human culture because social life and space are heavily populated by animals of many different kinds and in many differing ways. Another impetus that has influenced the development of the field is ecofeminist and other environmentalist viewpoints on nature-society relations.
• * Language geography - studies the geographic distribution of language or its constituent elements. There are two principal fields of study within the geography of language:
• *# Geography of languages - deals with the distribution through history and space of languages,
• *# Linguistic geography - deals with regional linguistic variations within languages.
• * Sexuality and space - encompasses all relationships and interactions between human sexuality, space, and place, including the geographies of LGBT residence, public sex environments, sites of queer resistance, global sexualities, sex tourism, the geographies of prostitution and adult entertainment, use of sexualised locations in the arts, and sexual citizenship.
• * Religion geography - study of the influence of geography, i.e., place and space, on religious belief.
• Development geography - study of the Earth's geography concerning its inhabitants' standard of living and quality of life. Measures development by looking at economic, political, and social factors and seeks to understand both the geographical causes and consequences of varying development, in part by comparing More Economically Developed Countries with Less Economically Developed Countries.
• Economic geography - study of the location, distribution, and spatial organization of economic activities worldwide. Subjects of interest include but are not limited to the location of industries, economies of agglomeration, transportation, international trade and development, real estate, gentrification, ethnic economies, gendered economies, core-periphery theory, the economics of urban form, the relationship between the environment and the economy, and globalization.
• * Marketing geography - a discipline within marketing analysis that uses geolocation in the process of planning and implementation of marketing activities. It can be used in any aspect of the marketing mix – the product, price, promotion, or place.
• * Transportation geography - branch of economic geography that investigates spatial interactions between people, freight, and information. It studies humans and their use of vehicles or other modes of traveling and how flows of finished goods and raw materials service markets.
• Health geography - application of geographical information, perspectives, and methods to the study of health, disease, and health care, to provide a spatial understanding of a population's health, the distribution of disease in an area, and the environment's effect on health and disease. It also deals with accessibility to health care and spatial distribution of health care providers.
• * Time geography - study of the temporal factor on spatial human activities within the following constraints:

1. Authority - limits of accessibility to certain places or domains placed on individuals by owners or authorities
2. Capability - limitations on the movement of individuals based on their nature. For example, movement is restricted by biological factors, such as the need for food, drink, and sleep
3. Coupling - restraint of an individual, anchoring him or her to a location while interacting with other individuals to complete a task

• Historical geography - the study of the human, physical, fictional, theoretical, and "real" geographies of the past. It seeks to determine how cultural features of various societies across the planet emerged and evolved by understanding how a place or region changes through time, including how people have interacted with their environment and created the cultural landscape.
• Political geography - study of the spatially uneven outcomes of political processes and how political processes are themselves affected by spatial structures. The inter-relationships between people, state, and territory.
• * Electoral geography - study of the relationship between election results and the regions they affect, and of the effects of regional factors upon voting behavior.
• * Geopolitics - analysis of geography, history, and social science concerning spatial politics and patterns at various scales, ranging from the level of the state to international.
• * Strategic geography - concerned with the control of, or access to, spatial areas that affect the security and prosperity of nations.
• * Military geography - applying geographic tools, information, and techniques to solve military problems in peacetime or war.
• Population geography - study of how spatial variations in the distribution, composition, migration, and growth of populations are related to the nature of places.
• Tourism geography - study of travel and tourism, as an industry and as a social and cultural activity, and their effect on places, including the environmental impact of tourism, the geographies of tourism and leisure economies, answering tourism industry and management concerns and the sociology of tourism and locations of tourism.
• Urban geography - the study of urban areas, in terms of concentration, infrastructure, economy, and environmental impacts.