Exploring Spatial Point Patterns in Agriculture

Abstract

The chapter describes the basic steps in the explorative analysis of spatial point patterns, offering a comprehensive description of point processes and applications on agricultural farms, providing in particular, the introductive statistical methods to analyse spatial clustering. The empirical exercises are performed using the R - package spatstat. The analysis of point patterns has recently interested the agricultural economists, the geographers, and the statisticians. In agricultural studies, the points, for instance, could represent trees, farms, animal nests, earthquake epicentres, domiciles of new cases of influenza, and so on. The use of the proposed tools can highlight information on spatial distribution of agricultural activities that would be hidden analysing the phemomena with standard not spatial methods. A wide range of different techniques are applied in the chapter, to analyse spatial patterns and assess the deviation from the complete spatial randomness. The analysis of point pattern can be performed by adopting a set of graphical and parametrical techniques. Additionally, the estimation of different functions has been carried out applying inter-event distances, neighbour to neighbour distance, and point-to-nearest-event distance in order to recover information from event localization.