spatial autocorrelation

Testing the Mantel statistic with a spatially-constrained permutation procedure

Mantel tests are widely used in ecology to assess the significance of the relationship between two distance matrices computed between pairs of samples. However, recent studies demonstrated that the presence of spatial autocorrelation in both distance …

Beyond neutrality: disentangling the effects of species sorting and spurious correlations in community analysis

The methods of direct gradient analysis and variation partitioning are the most widely used frameworks to evaluate the contributions of species sorting to metacommunity structure. In many cases, however, species are also driven by spatial processes …

Optimizing the choice of a spatial weighting matrix in eigenvector-based methods

Abstract Eigenvector-mapping methods such as Moran's eigenvector maps (MEM) are derived from a spatial weighting matrix (SWM) that describes the relations among a set of sampled sites. The specification of the SWM is a crucial step, but the SWM is …