Quantitative Methods in Physical-Geography Research

The use of quantitative techniques in physical geography is discussed with reference to three particular disciplines—climatology, glaciology and geomorphology. Although significant advances have been made in these and other particular disciplines, there is increasing need for applying quantitative methods to the composite of geographical processes, related to various forms of the exchange of matter and energy. A quantitative approach to integrated physical-geography research is needed for a resolution of the general problem of a quantitative explanation of the physical-geographic process and the formulation of a quantitative theory of physical geography. Aside from inherent difficulties in applying quantitative techniques to physical geography, particularly the biogeographic disciplines, there are additional problems of an organizational nature in the Soviet Union, where specialists in various disciplines tend to be associated with different institutes.     

Pre-service teachers learn to teach geography: a suggested course model

How to improve geography education via teacher preparation programs has been a concern for nearly three decades, but few examples of a single, comprehensive university-level course exist. The purpose of this article is to share the model of a pre-service geography education methods course. Within the course, geography content (physical and social) is paired with different pedagogic strategies (visual, kinesthetic, technology) and other content areas (reading, history) to refine pre-service teacher conceptualizations of geography as a subject and to see geography’s potential inclusion across various grade levels. End of course student evaluations demonstrate student satisfaction and learning, while post-course interviews similarly indicate that the class was (1) more useful and practical than other education program coursework for beginning ones teaching career, and (2) stimulated the continued use of geographic concepts and materials.     

抗战时期对西南历史地理的研究

抗战时期,随国民政府还都重庆,大批史地学者和教学科研机构云集西南。他们应西南开发的需要,积极开展西南历史地理的教学、科研工作,并在对西南历史政治地理、西南历史民族地理、西南历史经济地理、西南历史自然地理等方面的研究上取得不同程度的进展。西南历史地理研究的特点主要表现在内容、方法、目的三个方面。     

Geography: a different sort of discipline?

Debate continues about the inter-relationships between human and physical geography and their different research and publication practices. Relatively little data about these are available, however. Using an analysis of all publications submitted by UK geographers to the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise, this paper identifies a substantial difference between human and physical geographers in their publication strategies. Most physical geographers place their research papers in specialized inter-disciplinary journals and make relatively little use of geography outlets: most human geographers, on the other hand, publish in geography journals. Comparisons with other disciplines – in the earth and environmental and social sciences respectively – also identify differences between geographers and their peers. The overall conclusion is that, with regard to research and publication at least, UK geography cannot be presented as a single academic community with strong internal ties, but rather as a conglomerate of separate communities writing for different audiences.     

Principles of Organization of a College Course in the use of Mathematical Methods in Physical-Geographic Research

The fundamentals underlying a proposed course on the use of mathematical techniques in physical geography are discussed. Four basic sections are: (1) a grouping of geographical problems from the point of view of systems theory, the various forms of cause-and-effect relationships in complex geographical systems, and the choice of appropriate mathematical apparatus for solving related problems; (2) the theory of models and the modeling of geographical research; (3) methods of mathematical formulation of geographical problems, and the potentialities and limitations of particular mathematical techniques; (4) problems relating to the data base required for the use of mathematical methods. Illustrative examples should be taken both from mathematics, to familiarize students with the applicability of particular techniques to geographical problems, and from geography, to analyze the prospects of solving a particular problem with different methods.     

‘What about my voice’: emancipating the voices of children with disabilities through participant-centred methods

Children with diverse physical, communication and/or cognitive impairments are often overlooked as active research participants. This paper challenges and lays bare norms and constructs, such as ableism and adultism, which lead to children with disabilities being left out or researched by-proxy. Additionally, the paper contests these constructs through discussing and presenting participant-centred research methods that seeks to enable children’s involvement and establish them as legitimate research participants. The application of these methods in children geography studies is illustrated through the author’s own use of creative methods of activity-based interviews and co-construction narration with older children with various physical/neurological impairments. Overall, the aim of the paper is to bridge some gaps, dispel assumptions and inspire researchers with additional ways of conceptualising and approaching research with children with disabilities, since the inclusion of all children in research rests with researchers and their understanding and use of appropriate research methods.     

On the Study of the History of Geographical Ideas

The author rebuts the criticism by Yu. G. Saushkin that the book Razvitiye geograficheskikh idey [The Evolution of Geographical Ideas] is in effect a history of physical geography rather than a history of geography as a whole. Isachenko contends that concepts of natural science have been at the root of geography throughout its history and it is therefore natural for a history of geographical ideas to deal predominantly with the ideas of physical geography. Far from having ignored human geography, Isachenko contends, his book traces the anthropocentric school through its various stages of development. Only the survey of Soviet geography was restricted to physical geography, the author says, because Soviet geography consists of two virtually independent disciplines and the author happens to be a physical geographer viewing his discipline as the foundation of all geography.     

On the distribution of certain forest trees in Scotland,as shown by the investigation of post‐glacial deposits

An attempt is made to identify the main trends in the development of physical geography as a distinctive discipline. In particular the relationship between physical and human geography is examined with a view to identifying possible paths for the future development of physical geography as an integrated discipline.     

“Riding the rip”: an experiential and integrated human–physical geography curriculum in Costa Rica

Integrating research into short-term study abroad programs is challenging because of language, fieldwork logistics, and traditional learning models based on passive classroom experiences. Experiential learning often makes use of research as experience, but relatively few examples integrate human and physical geography. Here, we describe an experiential and integrated human–physical undergraduate geography curriculum in Costa Rica. We combine rip current morphodynamics, beach-user surveys, and cultural landscape in a 3-week program in Costa Rica. Emotions associated with the direct and indirect experience of “riding the rip” positively influenced the cognitive domain of student learning.     

The Effectiveness of Internet-based Instruction: An experiment in physical geography

Geographers increasingly use the Internet as an instructional tool in higher education. The effect of Internet-based instruction on learning, however, is essentially unknown. This research involves a matched-pairs experiment that assesses the differences in student performance between a group of students taking an Internet-based lesson in introductory physical geography, and another group learning the same material via traditional classroom methods. Both groups were subject to the same knowledge assessment post-test, and scores were statistically analysed to determine whether one instructional method led to better student performance over the other. Results show that the Internet can be a viable alternative instructional tool compared with traditional classroom methods.     

Restructuring physical geography

The tripartite division of physical geography into geomorphology, climatology and biogeography is still often quoted, but developments in the last two decades have resulted in restructuring of the discipline. Significant publications by physical geographers now occur dominantly in multidisciplinary rather than in core geography journals. Analysis of the contents of ten journals and of the submissions to the 1996 UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) demonstrate the current pre-eminence of two sub-disciplines: geomorphology with hydrology, and Quaternary environmental change. Complementing research in the sub-disciplines, six trends towards a more integrated physical geography are identified as indicators of restructuring that has already occurred. Three futures are suggested for physical geography. The first, the status quo, is thought to be unlikely. The second, the disappearance of physical geography into other disciplinary areas would leave holistic investigations to other disciplines and so is undesirable. Thus, the third alternative, a renaissance of a more integrated physical geography, provides the most likely future. It is supported by existing integrative trends, provides a natural sequel to reductionist specialization, reflects the strong identity for the geographical approach to the earth and environmental sciences and the spatio-analytical approach integrating deductive and inductive studies, and it focuses on human–environmental interactions that could have implications for geography as a whole.     

人文地理过程内涵辨析与模拟探讨

人文地理过程是陆地表层系统地理过程最重要的组成部分之一。本文从陆地表层系统科学的角度出发,探讨了人文地理过程的基本内涵及主要组成部分,指出人口迁移过程和经济集聚-扩散过程是人文地理过程最重要的要素过程,城市化和土地利用变化是人文地理过程最直接的空间表达形式;在此基础上进一步探讨了人文地理过程模拟的核心内容,包括要素模拟和综合过程模拟;提出了人文过程模拟的主要数据源获得途径与模拟方法,指出了人文地理过程模拟需要解决的几个关键问题。     

On the Significance of Lenin's Ideas for Soviet Geography

The president of the Geographical Society USSR reviews the present state of Soviet geographic theory in the light of Leninist philosophy. The objective existence of natural regions with definite boundaries is affirmed. The approach of “social physics,” applying natural laws to social phenomena, is rejected. The use of mathematical techniques is welcomed, but not to the extent of giving rise to a separate discipline of “theoretical geography” that would deal with whatever is common to both physical and economic geography. The geographical environment is defined as that part of the earth's natural environment in which nature and society are in direct interaction. Both geographical determinism and social determinism (geographical nihilism) are rejected. The definition of geography as a system of scientific disciplines is affirmed, and a proposed redefinition of geography as dealing with the evolution and control of dynamic spatial systems is rejected.     

《诗经》中农业地理知识探微

本文用地理学的方法,细致分析和探究了《诗经》中蕴藏的农业地理知识,其中包括农业自然资源条件、自然灾害、土地利用、重农思想、物候与农事活动。主要的粮食作物与经济作物、发达的畜牧业等。古为今用,作者通过对《诗经》中农业地理知识的深刻挖掘,得出了三个有益的启示。可为今日农业生产和农业地理研究提供一些借鉴。     

The Place of Regional Economic Geography in the System of Geographical Sciences

The author holds that regional geography cannot be regarded as an independent geographic discipline because it lacks its own system of laws, such as the natural laws that operate in physical geography and the social laws that operate in economic geography. He agrees with the view that both physical and economic geography fall into theoretical and regional departments, and that regional studies test the localized application of the general laws formulated by the theoretical departments of the two great divisions of geography.     

On the Unity of Geography

A Leningrad University physical geographer criticizes attempts to affirm the unity of geography through the creation of new disciplines like “general geography,” which would focus on study of the man-nature relationship. He contends that such a general geography, which would seek to identify general geographic laws, is advocated primarily by economic geographers who would emphasize the role of man at the expense of physical geography. Isachenko takes issue with the view that what makes any research “geographical” is its relationship to man. He contends that the criterion of whether any investigation is “geographical” is its relationship to the geosystem, defined as any natural complex, ranging from the global to the local scale. In his opinion, the unity of geography should be furthered not through the establishment of new supradisciplines, such as general geography, but through closer ties, both in methodology and in organizational terms, between the two main groups of geographical disciplines—physical geography and economic geography.     

Present Problems in Theoretical Geography

The need for a distinctive discipline of theoretical geography is enhanced by three current research trends in geography related to the scientific and technical revolution. They are remote sensing, resource use and economic location. Theoretical geography is concerned with the automated processing of the growing body of geographical data, the study of complex geosystems and their multidimensional geospaces and the development of a set of geographical axioms. The development of theoretical geography is closely related to the growing use of mathematical methods in geography by formulating geographical problems in a form amenable to mathematical analysis. Theoretical geography helps to formalize geographical concepts and facilitates the building of models in geography. Models, in turn, provide a better understanding of a system than can be expressed in words.     

INTERACTION BETWEEN PHYSICAL AND ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

The chairmen of the departments of physical geography and economic geography of the USSR at Moscow University call for greater interplay between the two major subfields of geography, particularly in the context of geographical research for regional planning and geographical prediction generally. The demands of a modern economy require a more integrated approach to the study of spatial systems encompassing the totality of the natural environment, settlement, production and living conditions. Such close interaction between physical and economic geography needs to be pursued at all levels of geography as a discipline, from international geographical congresses down to ordinary student field practice.     

The Citation Relationships between Journals of Geography and Cognate Disciplines

There is an ongoing debate concerning the relationship between the disciplinary ends of the broad spectrum that is geography and also the relationship between geography and other disciplines, including the extent to which it is self-focussed or inward looking. These issues were assessed using an analysis of citation relationships between journals in the Thompson Scientific Journal Citation Reports databases at the category level. Thirty-four categories were used, comparing the two geography categories (‘Geography’, representing human geography and ‘Geography, Physical’, representing physical geography) with 32 other cognate categories. A matrix of the citation relationships between each category was developed using a relatedness factor that corrects for the opportunity for citations to occur. The resultant matrix of factors indicates that human geography journals are considerably more likely to cite their own papers than are those of physical geography, but that they are by no means the most self-citing of the journals assessed. Both human and physical geography journals have strong citation relationships with several other disciplines, with those for human geography most often being net export relationships in the sense of a balance of trade. This finding contradicts previous assertions that human geography imports more than it exports. The citation relationships of physical geography are smaller than those of human geography, and are typically small net imports. The relationship between human and physical geography journals is a small net export from physical geography to human geography, but their total trade volume is considerably smaller than their respective relationships with other disciplines. These results are likely to be caused by many factors in addition to the actual relatedness between disciplines and sub-disciplines, but they do represent a benchmark against which more detailed analyses can be assessed.     

THINGS THAT ARE ALMOST BUT NOT QUITE WELL KNOWN IN PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY

The author, a physical geographer, sees no need to despair about the present state of the discipline and the future of geography. He places geography in context among the sciences and finds a need for a synthesizing discipline that pulls together the findings of the particular disciplines. Such a function might be performed by landscape science and regional geography. In general, geographers are found to go too far afield in their research and there is a need to define the focus of the disciplines to eliminate the present centrifugal tendencies. Such a unifying focus might be found in geographical prediction. Geographers should be aware of the limits and capabilities of their discipline; geography is most effective in fostering solutions in conjunction with other disciplines. Fieldwork per se is criticized; some geographers make a fetish of fieldwork, spending their life in the field without ever writing up the results as a contribution to science. The language of geographical exposition must be cleansed of pseudoscientific jargon; too much geographical writing is incomprehensible. The use of mathematics in geography should be placed in historical perspective; it is not the panacea for all that ails geography.