Geostatistics, spatial rate of change analysis and boundary detection in plant ecology and biogeography

Abstract

Over the past decade, biologists and ecologists rather than geographers have been primarily responsible for developments in spatial analysis and geostatistics that are of great potential importance to both biogeography and community/landscape ecology. These advances in geostatistics, rate of change analysis and boundary detection and their application to floristic and environmental data at the community scale are reviewed. Issues of scale, spatial autocorrelation and terminology are introduced. Approaches to the description of spatial pattern in plant assemblages and environmental data, the quantification and removal of spatial autocorrelation, the spatial interpolation of data, techniques for the description and analysis of spatial rate of change and finally boundary detection are all reviewed in turn. Despite the development of new methods, the extent to which they have been applied more widely within both plant ecology and biogeography is limited. The paper concludes that perhaps the time is right for biogeographers to reassess the potential significance of these areas for the subject.