ABSTRACT
This chapter is the core of the book and provides the conceptual framework for point-pattern analysis in ecology. We begin by briey explaining the basic steps of point-pattern analysis in Section 2.1. This is followed by the introduction of the basic data types of interest in ecology (Section 2.2) and the summary statistics adapted to explore each of these data types (Section 2.3). We then describe the different ways that null models can be used to test ecological hypotheses or conduct exploratory analyses (Section 2.4), followed by an introduction of the general methods used to compare data and the output of point-process models (Section 2.5). We end the chapter with a discussion of the methods used to detect and deal with heterogeneities (Section 2.6).
