Tobler's First Law Of Geography
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Tobler's First Law Of Geography
The First Law of Geography, according to Waldo Tobler, is "everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things." This first law is the foundation of the fundamental concepts of spatial dependence and spatial autocorrelation and is utilized specifically for the inverse distance weighting method for spatial interpolation and to support the regionalized variable theory for kriging. The first law of geography is the fundamental assumption used in all spatial analysis. Background Tobler first presented his seminal idea during a meeting of the International Geographical Union's Commission on Qualitative Methods held in 1969 and later published by him in 1970. Tobler was probably not extremely serious when he originally invoked the first law and instead was explaining limitations brought about by computers of the 1970s. He certainly did not think it would be as prominent in geography as it is today. Though simple in its presentation, this idea i ...
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Waldo Tobler
Waldo Rudolph Tobler (November 16, 1930 – February 20, 2018) was an American-Swiss geographer and cartographer. Tobler's idea that "Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things" is referred to as the "first law of geography." He has proposed a second law as well: "The phenomenon external to an area of interest affects what goes on inside". Tobler was an active Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara Department of Geography until his death. Academic background In 1961, Tobler received his Ph.D. in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington at Seattle. At Washington, he participated in geography's William Garrison-led quantitative revolution of the late 1950s. After graduating in 1961, Tobler became an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan, where he remained until moving to the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1977. Until his retirement he held the positions of Pr ...
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Geographic Information Systems
A geographic information system (GIS) is a type of database containing geographic data (that is, descriptions of phenomena for which location is relevant), combined with software tools for managing, analyzing, and visualizing those data. In a broader sense, one may consider such a system to also include human users and support staff, procedures and workflows, body of knowledge of relevant concepts and methods, and institutional organizations. The uncounted plural, ''geographic information systems'', also abbreviated GIS, is the most common term for the industry and profession concerned with these systems. It is roughly synonymous with geoinformatics and part of the broader geospatial field, which also includes GPS, remote sensing, etc. Geographic information science, the academic discipline that studies these systems and their underlying geographic principles, may also be abbreviated as GIS, but the unambiguous GIScience is more common. GIScience is often considered a subdiscip ...
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Empirical Laws
Scientific laws or laws of science are statements, based on repeated experiments or observations, that describe or predict a range of natural phenomena. The term ''law'' has diverse usage in many cases (approximate, accurate, broad, or narrow) across all fields of natural science (physics, chemistry, astronomy, geoscience, biology). Laws are developed from data and can be further developed through mathematics; in all cases they are directly or indirectly based on empirical evidence. It is generally understood that they implicitly reflect, though they do not explicitly assert, causal relationships fundamental to reality, and are discovered rather than invented. Scientific laws summarize the results of experiments or observations, usually within a certain range of application. In general, the accuracy of a law does not change when a new theory of the relevant phenomenon is worked out, but rather the scope of the law's application, since the mathematics or statement representing ...
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Urban Geography
Urban geography is the subdiscipline of geography that derives from a study of cities and urban processes. Urban geographers and urbanists examine various aspects of urban life and the built environment. Scholars, activists, and the public have participated in, studied, and critiqued flows of economic and natural resources, human and non-human bodies, patterns of development and infrastructure, political and institutional activities, governance, decay and renewal, and notions of socio-spatial inclusions, exclusions, and everyday life. Urban geography includes different other fields in geography such as the physical, social, and economic aspects of urban geography. The physical geography of urban environments is essential to understand why a town is placed in a specific area, and how the conditions in the environment play an important role with regards to whether or not the city successfully develops. Social geography examines societal and cultural values, diversity, and other cond ...
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Transportation Geography
Transport geography or transportation geography is a branch of geography that investigates the movement and connections between people, goods and information on the Earth's surface. Aims and scope Transportation geography detects, describes, and explains the Earth's surface's transportation spaces regarding location, substance, form, function, and genesis. It also investigates the effects of transportation on land use, on the physical material patterns at the surface of the earth known as 'cover patterns', and on other spatial processes such as environmental alterations. Moreover, it contributes to transport, urban, and regional planning. Transportation is fundamental to the economic activity of exchange. Therefore, transport geography and economic geography are largely interrelated. At the most basic level, humans move and thus interact with each other by walking, but transportation geography typically studies more complex regional or global systems of transportation that include ...
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The Isolated State
''The'' () is a grammatical article in English, denoting persons or things already mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The'' is the most frequently used word in the English language; studies and analyses of texts have found it to account for seven percent of all printed English-language words. It is derived from gendered articles in Old English which combined in Middle English and now has a single form used with pronouns of any gender. The word can be used with both singular and plural nouns, and with a noun that starts with any letter. This is different from many other languages, which have different forms of the definite article for different genders or numbers. Pronunciation In most dialects, "the" is pronounced as (with the voiced dental fricative followed by a schwa) when followed by a consonant sound, and as (homophone of pronoun ''thee'') when followed by a ...
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Time Geography
Time geography or time-space geography is an evolving transdisciplinary perspective on spatial and temporal processes and events such as social interaction, ecological interaction, social and environmental change, and biographies of individuals. Time geography "is not a subject area per se", but rather an integrative ontological framework and visual language in which space and time are basic dimensions of analysis of dynamic processes. Time geography was originally developed by human geographers, but today it is applied in multiple fields related to transportation, regional planning, geography, anthropology, time-use research, ecology, environmental science, and public health. According to Swedish geographer Bo Lenntorp: "It is a basic approach, and every researcher can connect it to theoretical considerations in her or his own way." Origins The Swedish geographer Torsten Hägerstrand created time geography in the mid-1960s based on ideas he had developed during his earlier empiric ...
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Technical Geography
Technical geography is one of three main branches of geography and involves using, studying, and creating tools to obtain, analyze, interpret, and understand spatial information. The other two branches, human geography and physical geography, can usually apply the concepts and techniques of technical geography. However, a technical geographer may be more concerned with the spatial and technological concepts than the nature of the data. Thus, the spatial data types a technical geographer employs may vary widely, including human and physical geography topics, with the common thread being the techniques and philosophies employed. Within the branch of technical geography are the major and overlapping subbranches of geographic information science, geomatics, and geoinformatics. Technical geography is a product of geography's quantitative revolution."The ‘Quantitative Revolution’", GG3012(NS) Lecture 4, University of Aberdeen, 2011, webpag AB12 History While many techniques in t ...
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Spatial Heterogeneity
Spatial heterogeneity is a property generally ascribed to a landscape or to a population. It refers to the uneven distribution of various concentrations of each species within an area. A landscape with spatial heterogeneity has a mix of concentrations of multiple species of plants or animals (biological), or of terrain formations (geological), or environmental characteristics (e.g. rainfall, temperature, wind) filling its area. A population showing spatial heterogeneity is one where various concentrations of individuals of this species are unevenly distributed across an area; nearly synonymous with "patchily distributed." Examples Environments with a wide variety of habitats such as different topographies, soil types, and climates are able to accommodate a greater amount of species. The leading scientific explanation for this is that when organisms can finely subdivide a landscape into unique suitable habitats, more species can coexist in a landscape without competition, a phenome ...
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Scientific Law
Scientific laws or laws of science are statements, based on repeated experiments or observations, that describe or predict a range of natural phenomena. The term ''law'' has diverse usage in many cases (approximate, accurate, broad, or narrow) across all fields of natural science (physics, chemistry, astronomy, geoscience, biology). Laws are developed from data and can be further developed through mathematics; in all cases they are directly or indirectly based on empirical evidence. It is generally understood that they implicitly reflect, though they do not explicitly assert, causal relationships fundamental to reality, and are discovered rather than invented. Scientific laws summarize the results of experiments or observations, usually within a certain range of application. In general, the accuracy of a law does not change when a new theory of the relevant phenomenon is worked out, but rather the scope of the law's application, since the mathematics or statement representing th ...
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Moran's I
In statistics, Moran's ''I'' is a measure of spatial autocorrelation developed by Patrick Alfred Pierce Moran. Spatial autocorrelation is characterized by a correlation in a signal among nearby locations in space. Spatial autocorrelation is more complex than one-dimensional autocorrelation because spatial correlation is multi-dimensional (i.e. 2 or 3 dimensions of space) and multi-directional. Global Moran's ''I'' Global Moran's ''I'' is a measure of the overall clustering of the spatial data. It is defined as : I = \frac N W \frac where * N is the number of spatial units indexed by i and j; * x is the variable of interest; * \bar x is the mean of x; * w_ is a matrix of spatial weights with zeroes on the diagonal (i.e., w_ = 0); * and W is the sum of all w_ (i.e. W = \sum_^N \sum_^N ). Defining weights matrices The value of I can depend quite a bit on the assumptions built into the spatial weights matrix w_. The matrix is required because, in order to address spatial autoc ...
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Modifiable Areal Unit Problem
__NOTOC__ The modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP) is a source of statistical bias that can significantly impact the results of statistical hypothesis tests. MAUP affects results when point-based measures of spatial phenomena are aggregated into districts, for example, population density or illness rates. The resulting summary values (e.g., totals, rates, proportions, densities) are influenced by both the shape and scale of the aggregation unit. For example, census data may be aggregated into county districts, census tracts, postcode areas, police precincts, or any other arbitrary spatial partition. Thus the results of data aggregation are dependent on the mapmaker's choice of which "modifiable areal unit" to use in their analysis. A census choropleth map calculating population density using state boundaries will yield radically different results than a map that calculates density based on county boundaries. Furthermore, census district boundaries are also subject to change over ...
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