Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Among these activities, land change science, more so than any other endeavour,
highlights the full expanse of the geographical sciences (e.g., Lambin and Geist,
2005) because of its spatially explicit treatment of the coupled human-environment
system.
The geographical sciences, however, increasingly encapsulate more than the
formal discipline of geography. Geographical information science, including remote
sensing, now is standard fare in far-fl ung research communities and the ecological
sciences tackle human-environment relationships as they increasingly recognise the
intimate role of human activity in environmental processes and outcomes. The
coupled system - perhaps the hallmark of the original and contemporary study of,
respectively,
landschaft
and human-environment relationships - and its examination
in spatially explicit ways are no longer the primary domain of geography, if they
ever were. Rather these endeavours are increasingly those of interdisciplinary
research institutes (e.g., Postdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Stock-
holm Environment Institute), including those directed explicitly to land systems
(MacCaulay Institute, UK) and in the United States, newly minted doctoral degree
programmes in such elite institutions as Stanford and Columbia, which lack geo-
graphy programmes.
The immediate future appears to be one in which geographic practitioners of
land systems are drawn increasingly into integrative science programmes, while
geographic pedagogy, more so than at any other time in the past, opens to practi-
tioners from the beyond the formal discipline. What these developments portend
for geography per se are unclear (Turner, 2003). They do point to at least one major
conclusion: land systems, however defi ned, are the topic of engagement by an
increasingly large numbers of natural, social and integrated sciences whose shear
number of practitioners overwhelms the number of geographers undertaking the
topic. The land change/system science of the future will thus decidedly differ from
the
landschaft
study of the past.
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