Relative location describes a place with respect to its environment and its connection to other places.
Physical characteristics
Physical characteristics
describes the human and physical characteristics of a location.
Physical characteristics
mountains, rivers, beaches, topography, and animal and plant life of a place.
Human characteristics include the human-designed cultural features of a place, from land use and architecture to forms of livelihood and religion to food and folk ways to transportation and communication networks.
Region divides the world into manageable units for geographic study. Regions have some sort of characteristic that unifies the area. Regions can be formal, functional, or vernacular.
Functional regions are defined by their connections. For example, the circulation area for a major city area is the functional region of that paper.
Vernacular regions are perceived regions, such as "The South," "The Midwest," or the "Middle East;" they have no formal boundaries but are understood in our mental maps of the world.