What is the nature, scope and content of population Geography?

The need for a more detailed account of demographic characteristics resulted in an inclusion of micro details to the macro level studies, which, in turn, facilitated population mapping. Population mapping has a long tradition in geography and early on maps were largely confined to distribution and population density aspects.

Increasing use of quantification, aided by computers helped geographers handle large data sets. The start of demographic transition in Europe, in the middle of the eighteenth century, resulted in population growth at a rate unknown previously in human history. At the turn of the twentieth century, most of the developed countries had completed the transition while the world population continued to grow at increasing pace

Population Geography as Defined by its Subject Matter

According to the existing literature on the subject, population geography has become an independent sub-field of human geography and it is a comparatively recent phenomenon. The discipline can be interpreted as the study of population in a spatial perspective that also implies the investigation into human covering of the earth and its various occupations with reference to physical and cultural environmental issues. Since most of the world humanity lives in the less developed parts of the world, a significantly larger proportion of the net addition in world population during the first half of the twentieth century came from this part.

The field is concerned with a set of investigation subjects:

• A historical perspective of pre-historic and post-historic account of population
• Dynamics of number, size, distribution and growth patterns
• Qualities of population and their regional distribution
• Size and distribution, between rural and urban groupings of population and its interactions
• Dynamics, past and present trends in growth and its components of population change such as fertility, mortality and migration.
• Composition and structure, of demographic characteristics classification by age, sex-distribution and marital status.
• Social characteristics like of caste, racial, ethnic, religious and linguistic composition.
• Literacy levels of educational attainment and economic characteristics of the workforce participation rate and workforce structure.

The link between population growth and environmental degradation, coupled with economic development varies a great deal from one part of the planet to another and it depends on a variety of socio-economic parameters. These are the areas of concern for a population geographer.