2.4.4 Spatial Inference Design

Overview    Status    Temporal    Spatial    Results and next steps

Spatial pattern is a general term we use to cover the variety of ways you might be interested in characterizing the change in your indicator(s) over space.  For example, you might be interested in the following:  

• Is there a spatial pattern in the abundance of spawners across your domain of interest or are the abundances randomly distributed?
• Are there differences in spawner abundances between geographic domains?
• Is there a spatial gradient in spawner abundance that might captured by a spatial model?

Analysis of existing information might lead you to the development of a spatial model which may help you develop a refined spatial design or improve the precision of your estimates.

For more information on spatial inference designs see:

• Legendre, P., Dale, M. R. T., Fortin, M.-J., Gurevitch, J., Hohn, M. and Myers, D.  2002. The consequences of spatial structure for the design and analysis of ecological field surveys. – Ecography 25: 601–615. 
• Ripley, B.  2004.  Spatial Statistics.  Volume 545 of Wiley series in probability and statistics Wiley Series in Probability and Statistics - Applied Probability and Statistics Section Series Wiley-Interscience paperback series.
• Cressie, N. 1991.  Statistics for Spatial Data, New York: John Wiley & Sons.
• Schabenberger and Gotway 2005.  Statistical Methods for Spatial Data Analysis. Chapman & Hall/CRC Press.
• Bivand, R.S., E.J. Pebesma and V. Gómez-Rubio. 2008. Applied Spatial Data Analysis with R. Springer: New York, NY.

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