MapRoom Demo

Click the link below to view a demo of the MapRoom tool that accompanies ”Visualizing Human Geography” by Alyson Greiner.

MapRoom Demo

Arbogast WileyPLUS Demo

Click the link below to view a demo of the WileyPLUS course that accompanies ”Discovering Physical Geography” by Alan Arbogast.

Arbogast WileyPLUS Demo

Fletcher WileyPLUS Demo

 Click the link below to view a demo of the WileyPLUS course that accompanies ”Physical Geology: The Science of Earth” by Charles Fletcher.

 Fletcher WileyPLUS Demo

Concept Caching: Housing in Shanghai, China

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.

In the post Geography Directions: Census of 37% of the World, India and China are conducting their own censuses of their own populations.  Censuses are important for countries as they provide demographic information about their people, information for political and regulatory purposes, and data for economic forecasting.  What is more, counting people helps a country assess the needs of its infrastructure and services.  In China, as well as in India, one of the challenges of keeping up with such large populations is the provision of housing. These two images reveal the different contexts and difficulties of urban housing: historical preservation or high-density modernization; and suburban sprawl or agricultural land use.

Geography Directions: Census of 37% of the World

From our Geography Directions site reviewing Wiley-Blackwell’s Geography Compass review journal covering the entire discipline.  Keep up with cutting edge academic geography.  These articles may be useful for introducing students to the discipline or may be appropriate for upper division Geography classes.

Learning that China has recently completed its 2010 census of 1.3 million people and that India is in the midst of preparation for its February 2011 census of 1.2 billion people, I wanted to find out more about how one would go about counting what is in total, 37% of the world’s population. Keen to learn how this may be done, I read Len Cook’s article “The quality and qualities of population statistics, and the place of the census” in the journal “Area”. The article describes how population counts are the key to official statistical systems and the yardstick for many commercial and research surveys and analyses. In addition, the article describes how statistical offices around the world face an extensive range of challenges when counting their population, particularly because population flows have become much freer and the structure of families continue to evolve. Considering these issues, the article reviews how population counts have and will evolve over time in the UK and other countries.

In China , the decennial population Census was held between November 1 – 10, using an army of 6 million enumerators across the country. However, China has had special difficulties to overcome . Firstly, because of millions of illegal migrants, the so called “floating population”, and secondly because of the unauthorised births which were previously concealed due to the government’s stringent population policy. Some light should also be shed on the countrys’ skewed sex ratio at birth due to the preference for male offspring. There are officially about 120 male births to every 100 female instead of the global norm of 105. The official estimate of the sex ratio of the country’s 0- to-4 age group in 2008 was 123 males per 100 females.

The results of the census counts in China and India will be released at almost the same time in 2011 with India releasing their figures at the end of March and China at the end of April. Depending on the results a world population of 7 billion may be official by early next year.

To view the original article please visit the Geography Directions Blog.

A Geography of the Periodic Table of Elements

I remember staring at a large weathered chart of the Periodic Table of Elements that hung on the wall in my chemistry classes. So many elements, so little to do with geography. And then there were those two rows at the bottom that didn’t fit nicely into the chart. We never studied those elements, so what did they matter? 

Fast forward 20 years and I have become a techno-geek. My cell phone (like many of yours) is also my GPS, radio, camera, navigation system, email and internet browser. I love my LCD TV and blu ray-player (that doubles as a PS3). I have not one, but two hybrid cars. And without top row of misfit elements (highlighted in orange), none of these gadgets would be possible.

These misfit elements are collectively referred to as rare earth elements (REEs), not because as the name mistakenly implies, they are rare in nature, but because they are typically not found in large quantities, thus making their mining very expensive. But they are a key ingredient in most electronic devices and batteries – a typical hybrid car has roughly a kilogram of REEs in its batteries. Ok, on to the geography.

Top Five countries supplying US REEs (source: USGS)

Country	% of US imports
China	90.2
France	3.1
Japan	2.2
Russia	1.4
Austria	0.8

China is the largest producer of REEs, accounting roughly 95-97% of the world’s production. From a geopolitical perspective, this puts them at a great advantage – countries are dependent on China for REEs. Moreover, China has recently reduced export quotas of REEs by nearly 75% and is threatening to reduce these quotas by another 30%. The U.S. imports over 90% of its REEs from China. This should result in a price increase for many electronic goods that we often take for granted. While some manufacturers are looking for substitutes for REEs for the production of goods (e.g. Toyota and hybrid cars), the US may have stumbled upon a proverbial jackpot in Afghanistan. In Helmand Province, in southern Afghanistan, government officials announced there are unexplored mineral deposits valued at nearly $1 trillion, of which almost 6% are REEs. This represents an incredible amount of REEs and would no doubt give Afghanistan a setting at the global resource table. Could Afghanistan meet the US and the rest of the world’s demand for REEs? How would China react if this is the case? What are some implications for economic development in Afghanistan? These are but a few questions students of political geography would find interesting.

Nature Iraq

For 35 years, both the people and the land of Iraq have suffered from varying combinations of dictatorship, war, and sanctions. Nature Iraq is an active consortium of scientists and other experts who are dedicated to assessing the current state of the environment in Iraq. Operating at great risk to themselves, they are documenting the consequences of civil strife on water resources, cultural adaptations, biodiversity, and soils.

Working under the auspices of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Nature Iraq has the short-term goal of assessing current conditions, with longer-term commitments to resource protection and environmental restoration. The Nature Iraq web site provides reports on the group’s many projects, quarterly newsletters, and opportunities to support this work.

As detailed on the site’s What We Do page, Nature Iraq recognizes that environmental problems such as desertification and climate change are not constrained by political boundaries, but it also recognizes that localized conditions can have a tremendous influence on the precise ways in which such global processes unfold.

Concept Caching: Zebras in South Africa, Thornbrush Savanna

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.

It is images such as these that make up the geographical imaginations of Africa as mentioned in the post, The Conservation Balance in Sub-Saharan Africa.  The African savanna is home to its “big-game” and thus, to it’s major tourism industry.  The creation of National Parks, like Kruger, can be seen as partnerships made between conservation, government and tourism.  It is the indigenous people, however, that rely on the virtue of that partnership, as they can either be included in conservation efforts or excluded/displaced from their land altogether.  Ultimately, that decision seems to depend on economic, not social, accounting.

The Conservation Balance in Sub-Saharan Africa

Most of our mental images of Sub-Saharan Africa are associated with the physical environment: its vast, open landscapes; its unique big mammals; and its native, “traditional” peoples.  Our geographic imaginations have been coded by historical travels, popular media, tourism, other narratives tagged as African.  Today, the real African landscapes behind our imaginations are caught in a struggle between population growth, development needs, and globalization.  In the middle of all this are Africa’s plant and animal systems.  Conserving Africa’s biodiversity is a complicated problem that marks battle lines between various actors: global organizations and local peoples; hunters, environmentalists and tourists; rich and poor; Africans and non-Africans.  In a September issue of The Economist, the article “Game Conservation in Africa: Horns, claws and the bottom line” provides a broad look at the debates over conserving African biodiversity, in particular its iconic large animal species.  Using this article as a starting point, we can analyze the geographies of human-animal conflict and interaction to gain a better understanding of the challenges to conserving Sub-Saharan Africa’s biodiversity.

One of the most difficult problems facing African wildlife is the encroachment of human settlements into wildlife habitats.  As human settlements move out into undeveloped, “wild” lands, fences are built, native vegetation is changed, and fresh water sources are taken over.  This expansion and appropriation of land and water in Africa is the main source for clashes between humans and animals.  Farm lands and crops are trespassed by elephants and other foragers.  Livestock is targeted by lions and other predators.  Shared water sources can bring human populations in direct conflict with dangerous animals like hippos and crocodiles.  When humans feel they are in danger, the only recourse is to kill offending or threatening animals. As more and more settlements materialize, the end result is the overall decline of wildlife populations.  Another effect of human settlement is the fragmentation of habitat, particularly of range lands.  Many large animals in Africa require significant land areas to hunt, migrate or forage.  As these human settlements pop up, they break up the necessary open land that many animals, especially big cats, need.  This creates more opportunity for conflict between these animals and settlements.

Local peoples are not solely to blame.  And in fact, this conflict between humans and ecosystems has happened the world over.  However, it is the power of the African landscape in Western imaginations that seems to make conservation such a necessity.  The questions are what kind of conservation should be supported and how to best integrate tourism.  Historically, conservation has involved the creation of parks or conservancies that had expelled indigenous peoples, creating “conservation refugees.” These early parks were built on imaginations of pristine, untouched wilderness that did not include the presence of native people.  However, increasingly, conservation projects have begun to centrally involve indigenous people in the stewardship of the land and its biodiversity.  Some of these conservation projects are seen as community initiatives where they provide local peoples with actual income or social support in exchange for promoting conservation or for more sustainable livelihoods.  Some hope that such initiatives will eventually provide an avenue for poverty alleviation, yet when studies have proved more data is necessary to judge them a success.  Safari tourism has provided a somewhat positive outlook, as first of all safaris are geared toward viewing wildlife, as opposed to hunting it.  Safari fees in some areas have been used to lease land from locals, which relieves some pressures allowing native vegetation and wild animals to return.  Further, fees have supported local schools, in addition to the staff, rangers and maintenance of the conservation area. However, the safari business has its spatial limitations, since most safari tourists are interested in the big game seen in the African savannas.  Such a model has yet to provide any benefits to other African ecosystems like the Congo Basin, which is plagued by illegal logging that directly threatens gorillas and other forest wildlife.

Ultimately, the question seems to relate to economic bottom lines.  The hope tied to locally inclusive, community initiatives requires a balance between providing indigenous people more income or a better quality of life than they would achieve exploiting the land and its wildlife as they had prior to the presence of conservation efforts.  And, that conservation money comes from private, international interests, which has political implications and creates a reliance on goodwill and continued valuation of outside geographic imaginations of Africa.

Father of the Green Revolution: Norman Borlaug

Between 1825 and today the world’s population has multiplied by almost 7 going from 1 billion to 6.8 billion.  This “demographic explosion” has to be understood as a phenomenal revolution bringing serious concerns such as: does every inhabitant in the world have access to an adequate food supply?  Dr. Norman Borlaug, considered the “father of the Green Revolution” (the term “Green Revolution” was first used in 1968 by former USAID director William Gaud)worked to increase food security througout the world.

Born on March 25, 1914 in Cresco in Iowa, Norman Borlaug received his Ph.D.in plants pathology and genetics  from the University of Minnesota in 1942.

In 1944 he was sent to Mexico as a plant pathologist in order to stop the “rust”, a fungal disease affecting wheat leaves and grains. There, working in the fields with the farmers and the laborers, by taking wheat and cross-breeding it, he developed new seeds that yielded more and were more disease resistant.  In the early 50′s, the  improved  wheat seeds made Mexico self-sufficient.  In the early 60′s  the improved wheat seeds were shipped to India.

Dr. Norman Borlaug’s dedication has helped feed hundreds of million of citizens in the world and as a way of consequence has brought peace.  He received numerous adwards including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.

Although we understand that the Green Revolution can rise negative criticism, we cannot forget Dr. Norman Borlaug’s quote: “it is a change towards the right direction, although it has not transformed the world into Utopia”

I “met” Dr.  Norman Borlaug in 2004 while gathering  information on the Agricultural Green Revolution, one key element of the agricultural geography.  Since then I have had the privilege to meet Dr. Noel Vietmeyer who worked for more than 20 years on projects with Dr. Norman Borlaug.

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