Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
by habitat loss. As a whole, they contain an estimated 44% of
all fl owering plants and 35% of all animal species within four
groups (mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians). Most are
tropical forests, tropical islands, or Mediterranean regions. It
can be argued that hotspots are where there is the greatest need
for conservation, yet on around 12% of the land surface of the
Earth they are home to about 20% of the world's population.
Furthermore, the population growth rate of 1.8% (1995-2000) in
the hotspots exceeds the global average of 1.3%; and only 38% by
area of the hotspots are currently protected in national parks or
other types of reserves. Thus, there are inescapable geographical
aspects to the scientifi c, practical, and ethical questions that
individuals, businesses, and governments have to address.
Landscape geography
Geographically, the concept of landscape refers to a part of the
Earth's surface viewed as a whole, including a set of phenomena,
their characteristics, and those aspects of the biophysical
and human environment that are infl uential. Alexander von
Humboldt defi ned landscape as '
Der totale Character einer
Erdgegend
' (the total character of an Earth region). As such, it
subsumes the three core concepts of geography - space, place,
and environment - and can lay claim to providing geographers
with their elusive 'object of study'. It remains elusive, however,
because there are numerous different ways of viewing landscapes
both by geographers and others. Thus, for example, they may
be all of the following: particular confi gurations of landforms,
vegetation, land-use, and settlement; mosaics of interacting
ecosystems; higher-level holistic systems that include human
activities; arrays of pixels in satellite images; or sceneries that
have aesthetic values determined by culture. In geography, the
traditional emphasis was on the morphology or visible form of the
landscape, but this is only one of the ways modern geographers
view landscapes.
