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Population geography is the study of the distribution, composition, migration, and growth of human populations in relation to the geographic characteristics of specific area. It focuses on how populations are distributed across space, the factors influencing these distributions, and the implications for resources, environment, and societal development. This branch of geography integrates demographic data with spatial analysis to understand patterns such as population density, urbanization, and migration trends. Population geography involvesdemography in a geographical perspective.[a] It focuses on the characteristics of population distributions that change in a spatial context. This often involves factors such as where population is found and how the size and composition of these population is regulated by the demographic processes offertility,mortality, andmigration.[1]
Contributions to population geography are cross-disciplinary because geographical epistemologies related to environment, place and space have been developed at various times.[2] Related disciplines include geography, demography,sociology, andeconomics.
Since its inception, population geography has taken at least three distinct but related forms, the most recent of which appears increasingly integrated with human geography in general. The earliest and most enduring form of population geography emerged in the 1950s, as part of spatial science. Pioneered byGlenn Trewartha,Wilbur Zelinsky,William A. V. Clark, and others in the United States, as well asJacqueline Beaujeu-Garnier andPierre George in France, it focused on the systematic study of the distribution of population as a whole and the spatial variation in population characteristics such as fertility and mortality.[1]Population geography defined itself as the systematic study of:
Accordingly, it categorized populations as groups synonymous with political jurisdictions representing gender, religion, age, disability, generation, sexuality, and race, variables which go beyond the vital statistics of births, deaths, and marriages.[1] Given the rapidly growing global population as well as the baby boom in affluent countries such as the United States, these geographers studied the relation between demographic growth, displacement, and access to resources at an international scale.[1]
Research topics of other geographic sub-disciplines, such assettlement geography, also have a population geography dimension:
All of the above are looked at over space and time. Population geography also studies human-environment interactions, including problems from those relationships, such asoverpopulation, pollution, and others.[3]
A few types of maps that show the spatial layout of population arechoropleth,isoline, and dot maps.
When is an area overpopulated? When its population can not be maintained without rapidly depleting non-renewable resources [39] (or converting renewable resources into non-renewable ones) and without decreasing the capacity of the environment to support the population. In short, if the long-term carrying capacity of an area is clearly being degraded by its current human occupants, that area is overpopulated.
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