Using neutral landscapes to identify patterns of aggregation across resource points

Abstract

Many organisms are aggregated within resource patches and aggregated spatially across landscapes with multiple resources. Such patchy distributions underpin models of population regulation and species coexistence, so ecologists require methods to analyse spatially-explicit data of resource distribution and use. I describe a method for analysing maps of resources and testing hypotheses about how resource distribution influences the distribution of organisms, where resource patches can be described as points in a landscape and the number of organisms on each resource point is known. Using a mark correlation function and the linearised form of Ripley's K-function, this version of marked point p..