This week in class the discussion revolved around “Why is geography important?”. It was emphasized that there is no single natural scale at which phenomena should/can be studied. However, different things can be assessed at different scales. Within this idea of scale dependant studies, it can be noted that studying smaller elements doesn’t tell us everything about the larger environment and studying the larger environment will not give us all the information about smaller elements within it.
This lecture also defined grain (and its meaning in different contexts), extent, elaborated on scale, and spatial autocorrelation.
Important take aways from this lecture included:
- examine the geographic explanation before biological, social, and environmental explanations
- study areas (at different scales) are not only unique (socially, environmentally, biologically) but also change over time
- always be aware of MAUP (Modifiable Areal Unit Problem)
- aspatial statistics presume spatial autocorrelation does NOT exisit
- extent should aways be larger then your study area