4 January 2017
In this class we were given a brief overview of the three topics that will be covered in the semester– landscape ecology, health geography and crime analysis– and the ways by which they relate to geography. Below are brief descriptions of each topic.
- Landscape ecology is the study of how landscape structure (‘pattern’) affects the processes that determine the abundance and distribution of organisms (Turner 1989). It is the study of the effect of pattern on process.
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- Referring to Figure 1 for example, areas in purple represent hospitable environments for butterflies and circles A and B represent two populations of butterflies. The road separating the two areas affect the distribution of butterflies because it prevents the two populations from interacting with each other (studies show that butterflies do not cross roads). Further, the presence of the road also means that a deceased member of Population A is more likely to get replaced by butterflies flying in from Area 1, which is a hospitable environment for butterflies. This is not the same for Population B being surrounded by Area 2, which is not considered a hospitable environment for butterflies. This is an example of how pattern (a road separating two populations) affects process (movement of butterflies).
Figure 1.
- Health geography explores the influence of place, space and community on health outcomes and health care delivery. For example, East Asian Babies tend to be smaller than North American Babies not because they are malnourished, but because their mothers, East Asian Women, tend to be more petite.
- Three main themes in Health Geography: disease ecology, health care delivery, and environment and health.
- Crime analysis looks at crime patterns and trend correlations to help inform the planning of resources for prevention and suppression of criminal activities.
- Theories in criminology: environmental criminology, social disorganization theory, rational choice theory, and broken window theory.
Key words:
Emergent processes – knowing individual parts of a whole doesn’t tell you much about the overall process. Eg. the path of and individual fish swimming on its own versus the path of a school of fish.
Scale – the scale at which you analyse a process determines the pattern/ process that you see.
References
Klinkenberg, B. (2017). GIScience in Research. [Lecture notes]. Retrieved from http://ibis.geog.ubc.ca/courses/geob479/notes/lecture1.html