A New Short Course in Environmetrics

An Introduction to Spatial Statistics

E
nvironmetrics Australia is pleased to announce a new short course in Spatial Statistics.
Many traditional methods of statistical analysis assume independence in sampled data.
In an environmental context this is unlikely to be the case. Conventional practice is to
either (a) proceed as if the spatial dependency didnt exist; (b) use physical or statistical
means of controlling or reducing the effects of spatial dependency; or (c) use a more
sophisticated approach to model the spatial dependency. This short course is intended
to provide the participant with an introduction to the last of these: modelling spatial
dependency.
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A
s with all courses offered by the Australian Centre for
Environmetrics, the course in Spatial Statistics will be
hands-on. Participants will be introduced to important
statistical concepts in an easily-grasped manner and the
learning will be consolidated by working through a series
of computer-based exercises. The course is divided into two components: Part I deals
with the characterisation and modelling of spatial dependency for quantitative data (eg.
soil moisture properties, PM
10
, nutrients in a waterbody) while Part II looks at
statistical models for spatial point processes
associated with qualitative data (eg. spatial
distribution of diseased trees, sightings of a rare
or threatened species, distribution of
contaminated sites).

Environmetrics Australia

E: info@environmetrics.net.au
W: http://www.environmetrics.net.au

Course Outline




Part I : Modelling Spatial Dependency

Characterising spatial dependency the variogram
Estimating the variogram
Variogram model fitting
Spatial interpolation
- Triangulated irregular networks (TINs)
- Inverse distance weighting
- Kriging
2-D variogramsurface
Ordinary Kriging
Block Kriging
Indicator Kriging

Fitted trend
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Part II : Spatial Point Processes

Spatial point processes and patterns
Complete Spatial Randomness (CSR)
Homogeneous Poisson processes
Heterogeneous Poisson processes
Basic statistics for describing spatial point patterns
Nearest-neighbour distribution functions
The K-function
Modelling spatial point processes




Software Tools Used

R version 2.3.0
(comprehensive statistical
software package)
VarioWin (variogram
estimation and modelling)
SGeMS (Stanford
Geostatistical Modelling
Software)
Spatstat (R library for
statistical analysis of point
pattern data)
FIELDS (R library for
modelling spatial data)