Sptotal: an R package for predicting totals and weighted sums from spatial data.

Abstract

In ecological or environmental surveys, it is often desired to predict the mean or total of a variable in some finite region. However, because of time and money constraints, sampling the entire region is often unfeasible. The purpose of the sptotal R package is to provide software that gives a prediction for a quantity of interest, such as a total, and an associated standard error for the prediction. The predictor, referred to as the Finite-Population-Block-Kriging (FPBK) predictor in the literature (J. M. Ver Hoef, 2008), incorporates possible spatial correlation in the data and also incorporates an appropriate variance reduction for sampling from a finite population. In the remainder of the paper, we give an overview of both the background of the method and of the sptotal package.