Concept Caching: Haiti and Dominican Republic political boundary

From our Concept Caching image cache that hopes to promote student spatial awareness by relating specific features on the Earth’s surface with their visual character and GPS coordinates. Through the site photographs and GPS coordinates demonstrate core concepts in geography.  Images are “cached” for viewing by core concept and by region.  Images are certainly useful for introducing visual content to students in all  Geography classes.

Fly along the political boundary between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and you see long stretches of the border marked by a stark contrast in vegetation: denudation prevails to the west in Haiti while the forest survives on the Dominican (eastern) side. Overpopulation, lack of governmental control, and mismanagement on the Haitian side combine to create one of the region's starkest spatial contrasts. (c) H.J. de Blij

This image submitted by Harm de Blij reveals a striking landscape of deforestation and hints at the differing impacts of local politics and governance that is behind such a difficult global problem.  The image provides a pertinent partner for the discussion of deforestation in the post, Hopes for World Forests.