Geography – a scientific field in the realm of interdisciplinary sciences

According to the Croatian Regulatory Act defining scientific and artistic realms, fields and branches of September 22nd 2009, geography belongs to the interdisciplinary scientific realm as a scientific field (8.02. Geography) consisting of the following branches: Physical Geography (8.02.01.), Human Geography (8.02.02.), Regional Geography (8.02.03.) and Applied Geography (8.02.04.).
This status of a unified scientific field under the realm of interdisciplinary sciences is well deserved and is derived from the fact that geography, by its scientific object and methodology, is in fact an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary science, which under the frame of its autonomous scientific system unites disciplines of intrinsically natural and human (and also technical) nature.
Due to its specific object (spatial complex of geosphere) and to the nature of its causal methodology, geography is a synthetic science which integrates the research results of its own disciplines with the research results of numerous correlative scientific disciplines (from the realms of natural, human and technical sciences) to understand and explain actual geospatial reality.
The aim of contemporary geography is to find consistencies in spatial relationships on the Earth’s surface and to predict future processes with the purpose of finding solutions for spatially oriented problems in our societies and defining sustainable development for our regions. Therefore, geography can neither be an exclusively natural nor human science – it is both natural and human, it is a bridging science with a character of a coherent synthetic science.