Structural Diversity of Plant Populations: Insight from Spatial Analyses

Abstract

Spatial analysis has been one of the most rapidly growing fields in ecology. It is related directly to a growing awareness among researchers that a spatial structure of biosystems, e.g., forests, is important in ecological thinking. The availability of the specific software supports the use of spatial analyses in different fields of the science and forestry science is only one example for this. Many data collected in the forests have the spatial and temporal dimensions and it allows us to use spatial statistics to quantitative description of the spatial structure of forest, which became an important element of modern continuous cover forestry. In this chapter, key elements: data types, null models, and summary statistics, which can be applied in spatial analyses, are briefly described. Real data sets collected from different forests were given to provide examples of spatial analyses. The key elements of spatial analysis in ecology are data type, the appropriate choice of summary statistics and null models. Selecting few of them in a single analysis makes the statements more reliable and realistic in the changing