AP Human Geography: Theories, Cultural Landscapes, Regions, and Geographical Tools

Vocabulary flashcards generated from lecture notes covering theories of human-environmental interaction, cultural landscapes, culture regions, diffusion types, spatial interaction concepts, map projections, thematic maps, and geographic tools.

Environmental Determinism

The view originating from the ancient Greeks that natural factors solely control the development of human qualities, and human thought, behavior, and action are determined by the natural climate they live in.

Possibilism

The view developed in the early $20\text{th}$ century as an alternative to determinism that people use their creativity, technology, and innovations to adapt, respond to, and overcome environmental conditions.

Cultural Landscape

Landscapes that are influenced in some way by people, revealing cultural traits such as land use, settlement patterns, architecture, and transportation methods.

Mormon Landscape

A community landscape in the American West created by founders and followers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, featuring farming villages with croplands surrounding clustered houses for protection.

Carl Sauer's Argument Against Determinism

The argument using cultural landscapes based on two key principles: $1$) The Earth is a system made up of diverse components interacting in complex ways, and $2$) The Earth is constantly changing due to natural and human-induced events.

Settlement Patterns

Spatial arrangements of human habitations categorized into dispersed, linear, and nucleated patterns.

Formal Region

A geographic region described by having unifying cultural or physical characteristics, such as commonalities in religion, language, ethnicity, commodities, or defined boundaries (e.g., the Dairy Belt or India).

Functional Region

A region defined by a political, social, or economic characteristic that possesses a central node or center of activity organizing the function (e.g., TARC or LMPD service areas).

Perceptual Region (Vernacular Region)

A region characterized by a population's sense of identity and attraction towards an area, tending to have undefined boundaries (e.g., the American South or the Bible Belt).

Cultural Diffusion

The spread of an epidemic, innovation, or idea throughout space and time.

Absorbing Barriers

An obstacle that completely stops an idea or innovation from diffusing.

Permeable Barriers

An obstacle that slows down diffusion without stopping it completely.

Independent Invention

An idea or innovation created without cultural diffusion.

Relocation Diffusion

A form of non-expansion diffusion where phenomena spread across space through physical migration, keeping the total population count constant.

Expansion Diffusion

A category encompassing all diffusion except relocation, resulting in an increasing change in numbers across space.

Hierarchical Diffusion

Expansion diffusion that spreads in a rank-order from highest to lowest rank, such as social classes or population sizes (e.g., fashion trends skipping from Paris to Vatican, New York, and Louisville).

Reverse Hierarchical Diffusion

Expansion diffusion that spreads in the opposite direction of hierarchical diffusion, moving from lowest to highest rank.

Contagious Diffusion

Expansion diffusion that spreads randomly based on proximity, such as infectious epidemics like $H1N1$ in $2009$.

Stimulus Diffusion

Diffusion where the underlying idea spreads and prompts new variations modified to fit local cultural tastes (e.g., McCurry Pan and McVeggie at McDonald's in India).

Distance Decay

The geographic phenomenon where a process, pattern, or event experiences decreasing impact or interaction as distance increases.

Distance Decay Graph

A visual model showing how customer interaction falls off as distance increases, contrasting travel tolerances for superstores, grocery stores, and convenience stores.

Accessibility

Describes the ease of accessing a specific place, often measured in terms of low travel time or low monetary cost.

Tobler's First Law

A geographic principle created by Waldo Tobler stating that 'everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.'

Time-space Convergence

The process where advances in communication and transportation lessen the effects of distance, making distant places seem closer in travel time and communication ease.

Scale

The ratio of distance on a map to what it represents in real life (e.g., $1\,\text{cm} : 1\,\text{mi}$).

Large Scale Map vs. Small Scale Map

A large scale map shows a smaller area with a larger amount of detail (regional/local), whereas a small scale map shows a larger area with a smaller amount of detail (global/national).

Reference Map

A map displaying boundaries, names, and unique identifiers of standard geographic areas, as well as major cultural and physical features (e.g., Map of Louisville).

Thematic Map

A map that emphasizes a specific theme, spatial topic, or subject matter.

Cartogram

A thematic map that distorts land area to show changes in value, where a greater measured value yields a noticeably larger land area.

Choropleth Map

A thematic map using different shades of colors to display variation in values, where darker shades typically indicate higher or more dense values.

Dot Map

A thematic map using dots to represent visual quantitative distribution, where more dots signify a greater value.

Graduated Symbol Map

A thematic map using symbols of varying sizes to represent data values, where larger symbols correspond to higher values.

Isoline Map

A thematic map featuring drawn lines that connect different places sharing a common or continuous value.

Map Projection

A transformation of Earth's spherical lines of latitude and longitude onto a flat surface, which inherently distorts distance, direction, area, or scale.

Mercator Projection

A conformal projection created by Gerardus Mercator in $1569$ that preserves $90^\circ$ angles and true direction for navigation, but distorts land area at the poles.

Robinson Projection

A compromise map projection created by Arthur Robinson in $1963$ that shows accurate land shapes and sizes while distorting the poles; commonly used in atlases and schools.

Peters Projection

An equal-area projection created by Arno Peters in $1967$ that preserves continent sizes as an alternative to Mercator, but distorts ocean shapes.

Polar Projection

An azimuthal equidistant projection created by Guillaume Postel in $1581$ that preserves distances from the poles, used by airline pilots and featured on the United Nations flag.

Conformal Map Projection

A map projection class that preserves the true shape of features while potentially distorting their size.

Equal Area Map Projection

A map projection class that distorts the oceans to minimize distortion of continental size and land mass area.

Remote Sensing

The gathering of information on Earth using sensors and instruments located at a far distance from the subject of study (e.g., tracking oil spills or storm tracking satellites).

Global Positioning System (GPS)

A system created by the US Department of Defense that uses satellites, radio signals, and receivers to determine the absolute location of people, places, and features on latitude and longitude.

Geoslavery

An ethical invasion-of-privacy concern regarding the potential misuse of GPS tracking to monitor an individual's exact location.

Geographic Information System (GIS)

A technology system that collects and stores georeferenced data to enhance map functionality and spatial analysis.

Vector vs. Raster Data Models (GIS)

Two spatial data structures where vector data stores location as points, lines, and area polygons, and raster data uses a grid array of pixels/cells to represent spatial features.

Qualitative Data

Subjective, opinion-based geographic data relying on the five senses and descriptive traits, such as color, texture, ethnicity, and observations.

Quantitative Data

Objective, fact-based geographic data relying on numbers and precise units of measurement, such as distance, height, and percentages.