Landscape

Articles

• Pierre Gourou
  28 March 2015, by M. B.

  Pierre Gourou (1900 to 1999) lived through the 20th century, and his work spreads over an exceptionally long period. The list of his works, numbering some fourteen, is as abundant after 1970 as before. Indeed, as he himself said, the text expressing his thought in its most completed form, Terres de bonne espérance, le monde tropical, dates from 1982, thus published when he was already very advanced in age. His work spans sixty years, from Tonkin in 1931 to L’Afrique Tropicale, nain ou (...)

• Renaturalisation
  4 June 2016, by P.P.

  This term is at present used in the spheres of urbanism, architecture and nature conservation. "Renaturalisation" (or ecological restoration when it is planned), is a process of modification of a portion of space, a built up area, a block, a quarter, a plot, a landscape or a territory, via the extension of occupation by natural elements – flora, fauna, surface water flows, morpho-dynamic activity etc. This mutation can, however take on different forms. It may concern a spontaneous (...)

• Geosystem
  23 May 2015, by C. V.-M.

  The geosystem is a concept enabling the analysis of dynamic combinations of biotic, abiotic and anthropic factors occurring within a «territory». It belongs to systemic approaches generally, and is used in geography to study interactions between the natural environment and societies, both temporal and spatial.
  It has considerable affinities with the ecosystem approach that developed in the 1930s in scientific ecology, which mainly concerned relationships between living species and their (...)

• Beach
  22 April 2016, by V. C.

  A beach is a geographical object that relates both to a geomorphological reality and to a social and cultural construction. Beaches were for a long time apprehended via physical geography, in particular the geomorphology of the coastal area which considers beaches as sections of coast where sediments, sand and shingle are accumulated by the sea. The beach is indeed regularly considered via the notion of the intertidal zone or foreshore, which refers to a terrestrial area, and above all an (...)

• Landscape
  28 May 2014, by C.Go

  Landscape is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as "all the visible features of an area of countryside or land, often considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal", or more simply in the French Robert dictionary as "a portion of countryside of which an observer has a view". Landscape is a fundamental notion in geographical approaches, in the same way as space, environment, «territory» or «region». Although other disciplines make use of this notion, such as agronomy, architecture or (...)