Twenty-five years of progress in physical geography: a personal view of its antecedents and trajectory

ABSTRACT

This article presents a very personal view of developments in physical geography up to the early 1990s and then in the last 25 years. In the latter period, four sub-areas (biogeography, climatology, geomorphology, and hydrology) have dominated the discipline, with glaciology and pedology also receiving significant attention. The advent of remotely sensed data sets, new sensors for proximate monitoring and analytical software have enabled research across many space scales with improving spatial and temporal resolution. Increasingly, new modelling approaches have been supported by field and laboratory experiments. Furthermore, investigations have become more applied and human-oriented. Three aspects of the last 25 years bear witness to the health, relevance and impact of the discipline: (i) increasingly collaborative, international and multi-disciplinary research; (ii) a trend towards application and professionalisation; and (iii) increasing engagement in ‘citizen science’ by developing and applying methods that involve volunteers in monitoring, analysing and interpreting vast geographical data sets.