BACKGROUND AND AIMS During the development of an even-aged plant population, the spatial distribution of individuals often changes from a clumped pattern to a random or regular one. The development of local size hierarchies in an Abies forest was analysed for a period of 47 years following a large disturbance in 1959. METHODS In 1980 all trees in an 8 x 8 m plot were mapped and their height g...

A decision tree is a classification algorithm that automatically derives a hierarchy of partition rules with respect to a target attribute of a large dataset. However, spatial autocorrelation makes conventional decision trees underperform for geographical datasets as the spatial distribution is not taken into account. The research presented in this paper introduces the concept of a spatial deci...

a r t i c l e i n f o Planning actions for species conservation involves working at both an ecologically meaningful spatial scale and a scale suitable for implementing management or conservation plans. Animal populations and conservation policies often operate across wide areas. Large-extent spatial datasets are thus often used, but their analyses rarely deal with problems inherent to spatial d...

Spatial autocorrelation is the correlation among data values, strictly due to the relative location proximity of the objects that the data refer to. This statistical property clearly indicates a violation of the assumption of observation independence a pre-condition assumed by most of the data mining and statistical models. Inappropriate treatment of data with spatial dependencies could obfusca...

Increasing attention is being paid to spatial distribution characteristics of haze pollution and its relation with socioeconomic factors. This study investigates the spatial autocorrelation of haze pollution in China and the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) on haze pollution in China using a panel data of 31 provinces over the period 2000-12. Using a widely used spatial autocorrelation...

In ecological field surveys, observations are gathered at different spatial locations. The purpose may be to relate biological response variables (e.g., species abundances) to explanatory environmental variables (e.g., soil characteristics). In the absence of prior knowledge, ecologists have been taught to rely on systematic or random sampling designs. If there is prior knowledge about the spat...

We study numerically the generation of high-order harmonics by two-center molecules for arbitrary angles between the molecular axis and the laser polarization axis. For fixed angle, the harmonic spectrum exhibits a minimum at a frequency which is independent of the laser parameters. The amplitude of each harmonic is strongly angle dependent, and a pronounced minimum is found at the same angle w...

Recent advances in analytical methods and exploration of regional diversity patterns in greater depth than simple whole-fauna patterns may change our understanding of the determinants of latitudinal gradients in species richness. Using a comprehensive database on the geographical distributions of the large fauna of endemic shorefishes from the Tropical Eastern Pacific (TEP), we delineated latit...