In this lecture I learned about why geography is an important contribution to our research and analysis with GIS. The lesson highlighted several crucial factors surrounding the scale of a research perspective. Researchers must carefully select the geography of their problem and pay attention to how scale influence their decisions. Some of the problems the class investigated were the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP), scale effect, and zoning effect.
The modifiable areal unit problem exist in a study where different statistical results can be obtained from the same set of data when the information is grouped at different levels of spatial resolution which this is considered the scale effect. In addition, another essence of the MAUP is the zoning effect, which variability in statistical results is observed as a function of the various ways these units can be grouped at a given scale.
The reason why geography is such a quintessential aspect of a research is because the geographical areas studied are always made up not of random groupings of species, individuals, households, but of species, individuals. households that tend to be more alike within the area than to those outside of the area. Therefore, I learned that I have to prioritize and consider the effect of scale when conducting any of my GIS research.