Abstract
The last few decades have seen an increasing interest and strong development in spatial point process methodology, and associated software that facilitates model fitting has become available. A lot of this progress has made these approaches more accessible to users, through freely available software. However, in the ecological user community the methodology has only been slowly picked up despite its obvious relevance to the field. This paper reflects on this development, highlighting mutual benefits of interdisciplinary dialogue for both statistics and ecology. We detail the contribution point process methodology has made to research on biodiversity theory as a result of this dialogue and reflect on reasons for the slow take-up of the methodology. This primarily concerns the current lack of consideration of the usability of the approaches, which we discuss in detail, presenting current discussions as well as indicating future directions.
Highlights
1.1 Point process models in the modern worldIn the past, complex statistical methods were not directly accessible to the applied user
A number of summary characteristics have been discussed in the literature, including several indices that summarise properties of the spatial pattern in a single number
The most versatile characteristics are summary characteristics that describe a point pattern through a function of distance and there is a large literature on the estimation and interpretation of these functions
Summary
Complex statistical methods were not directly accessible to the applied user. Unlike other general statistical methods such as generalised linear models and related approaches, spatial point process methodology has long been seen as a rather niche sub-area of statistics that is of theoretical interest to some, with few relevant data sets available and of little practical relevance. Due to their complexity, spatial point process models have been historically hard to fit, making them difficult to use in relevant applications and inaccessible to applied users. The slow uptake of spatial point processes by ecologists has occurred despite their suitability for analysis of the patterns formed by individuals in space—the very objects that ecologists are interested in
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