Jughrafiyat al-Munakh wa al-Nabat
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- Dar Al-Nahda Al-Arabiya
Jughrafiyat al-Munakh wa al-Nabat (The Geography of Climate and Plants) is a textbook on physical geography written by Egyptian geographer Yusuf Abd al-Majid Fayid, published in Beirut (1971) and Cairo (1973) for students of geography.
Purpose and Methodology
The work covers two major branches of physical geography: climatology and natural vegetation. Fayid explains that geographical scholarship customarily pairs these two subjects because natural vegetation serves as the living manifestation on the Earth's surface of how climatic conditions interact with one another and with the soil. Consequently, discussions demonstrating climatic effects routinely draw on examples of natural vegetation, while descriptions of plant characteristics typically trace them back to climatic influences.
Methodologically, the author frames his presentation around geographical distributions, adopting the world's continents as regional units. He justifies this choice on two grounds: first, that geography is fundamentally defined as the science of distributions; and second, that continents provide natural, uncontroversial regional units that avoid the arbitrary boundaries and widespread disagreements common to other regional classification schemes. The study also addresses specialized research in microclimatology (detailed climate) and examines the applied, practical relationship between climate and human life.
Structure and Contents
The book is organized into two primary sections containing twenty chapters, followed by a bibliography and a list of figures and maps:
- Part One: Climate (al-Munakh): Opens with an introduction to the atmosphere and meteorological concepts, followed by fourteen chapters treating temperature (Chapter 1), atmospheric pressure and winds (Chapter 2), humidity and precipitation (Chapter 3), air masses and fronts (Chapter 4), climatic classifications (Chapter 5), detailed microclimate (Chapter 6), and the relationship between climate and humankind (Chapter 7). The remaining chapters survey the climate of the world continent by continent: Africa (Chapter 8), Europe excluding Russia (Chapter 9), Asia and the Soviet Union (Chapter 10), North and Central America (Chapter 11), South America (Chapter 12), Australia and New Zealand (Chapter 13), and the Arctic and Antarctica (Chapter 14).
- Part Two: Plants (al-Nabat): Comprises six chapters covering soil (Chapter 15), natural vegetation (Chapter 16), forests (Chapter 17), grasslands (Chapter 18), deserts (Chapter 19), and the distribution of vegetation across the continents (Chapter 20).
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