

Cultural ecology: Also called Nature-Society Geography, the study of the interactions between societies and the natural environments in which they live.Coordinate system: A standard grid, composed of lines of latitude and longitude, used to determine the absolute location of any object, place, or feature on Earth’s surface.Contagious diffusion: The spread of a disease, an innovation, or cultural traits through direct contact with another person or another place.Connectivity: The degree of economic, social, cultural, or political connection between two places.Complementarity: The actual or potential relationship between two places, usually referring to economic interactions.Cognitive maps can include knowledge of actual locations and relationships among locations as well as personal perceptions and preferences of particular places. Cognitive map: An image of a portion of Earth’s surface that an individual creates in his or her mind.Choropleth map: A thematic map that uses tones or colors to represent spatial data as average values per unit area.Cartography: The theory and practice of making visual representations of Earth’s surface in the form of maps.Cartograms: A type of thematic map that transforms space such that the political unit with the greatest value for some type of data is represented by the largest relative area.Breaking point: The outer edge of a city’s sphere of influence, used in the law of retail gravitation to describe the area of a city’s hinterlands that depend on that city for its retail supplies.Azimuthal projection: A map projection in which the plane is the most developable surface.Anthropogenic: Human-induced changes on the natural environment.Aggregation: To come together into a mass, sum, or whole.Accessibility: The relative ease with which a destination may be reached from some other place.Absolute location: The exact position of an object or place, measured within the spatial coordinates of a grid system.Absolute distance: A distance that can be measured with a standard unit of length, such as a mile or kilometer.

However, the interaction among places is also determined by the size of each place, their level of connectivity, and the diffusion processes that carry information and cultural traditions from one place to another.

In general, places that are closer to each other in absolute distance tend to interact more. Geographers use a diverse set of concepts, tools, technologies, and mathematical equations to study places, regions, and the processes that link them.

All maps use symbols to depict spatial information. They have a characteristic scale and resolution. Geographers describe these variations by creating visual representations of spatial data in the form of maps. Looking at Earth from a spatial perspective means looking at how objects, processes, and patterns change over the earth’s surface. One thing that binds all geographers together is the spatial perspective. Since the first scholars began studying geography some 3,000 years ago, the field has matured into an important and wide-ranging area of academic and applied research. Human geography is the study of human activities on Earth’s surface.
