Geography as a spatial scienceEarlier we described geography as a spatial science, that is, we are interested in answering questions about some place or location, or looking at distributions of earth phenomena like climate and how climate interacts with other aspects of the earth system. Thus geographers answer four basic questions when studying our environment. First, geographers are concerned with location. By location we mean physically where something is at. A geographer might ask the question - "Where is a tropical rain forest located?" To answer this, one might simply look at a map and find that a rain forest is located at 5o North, 110o East. The use of latitude and longitude accurately defines where the forest is located. When geographers investigate place, they describe the environmental conditions that determine the object of study. Now the geographer may pose the question- "What are the environmental conditions that create a tropical rain forest?" To this we can respond by saying that tropical rain forests are found where the average annual temperatures are very high (coolest month averages 64.4oF) and there is ample rainfall in each month (2.4 inches a month). As you can see, our answer said nothing about the location but described what the place is like for a tropical rain forest. Questions of location and place do not give us much information about the distribution or spatial pattern of earth phenomena. For instance we might want to know - "What is the distribution of tropical rain forests on the Earth?". To this we could answer that tropical rain forests are found in low latitude, rainy, tropical regions such as the Amazon and Congo Basin and throughout much of Indonesia. We could support our answer with the fundamental tool of the geographer, a map:
Figure EG.3 Distribution of Tropical Rain Forests (Map courtesy of Windows to the Universe, http://www.windows.ucar.edu ) Finally, geographers are also interested in spatial interaction, which is how elements of our earth system interact with one another to create spatial patterns. We might ask - "How do mountains interact with weather systems to affect the distribution of vegetation?". By looking at maps of mountain, wind and precipitation patterns and, maps of vegetation we find that mountains oriented perpendicular to the flow of wind create moist conditions on the windward side and dry conditions on the leeward side. Thus forests tend to be located on the moist windward side and vegetation suited to drier conditions on the leeward.
|
