Sensitivity of codispersion to noise and error in ecological and environmental data

Codispersion analysis is a new statistical method developed to assess spatial covariation between two spatial processes that may not be isotropic or stationary. Its application to anisotropic ecological datasets have provided new insights into mechanisms underlying observed patterns of species distributions and the relationship between individual species and underlying environmental gradients. However, the performance of the codispersion coefficient when there is noise or measurement error ("contamination") in the data has been addressed only theoretically. Here, we use Monte Carlo simulations and real datasets to investigate the sensitivity of codispersion to four types of contamination commonly seen in many real-world environmental and ecological studies. Three of these involved examining codispersion of a spatial dataset with a contaminated version of itself. The fourth examined differences in codisperson between plants and soil conditions, where the estimates of soil characteristics were based on complete or thinned datasets. In all cases, we found that estimates of codispersion were robust when contamination, such as data thinning, was relatively low (<15\%), but were sensitive to larger percentages of contamination. We also present a useful method for imputing missing spatial data and discuss several aspects of the codispersion coefficient when applied to noisy data to gain more insight about the performance of codispersion in practice.Comment: 20 pages, 14 figure

3D Remote Sensing Applications in Forest Ecology: Composition, Structure and Function

Dear Colleagues, The composition, structure and function of forest ecosystems are the key features characterizing their ecological properties, and can thus be crucially shaped and changed by various biotic and abiotic factors on multiple spatial scales. The magnitude and extent of these changes in recent decades calls for enhanced mitigation and adaption measures. Remote sensing data and methods are the main complementary sources of up-to-date synoptic and objective information of forest ecology. Due to the inherent 3D nature of forest ecosystems, the analysis of 3D sources of remote sensing data is considered to be most appropriate for recreating the forest’s compositional, structural and functional dynamics. In this Special Issue of Forests, we published a set of state-of-the-art scientific works including experimental studies, methodological developments and model validations, all dealing with the general topic of 3D remote sensing-assisted applications in forest ecology. We showed applications in forest ecology from a broad collection of method and sensor combinations, including fusion schemes. All in all, the studies and their focuses are as broad as a forest’s ecology or the field of remote sensing and, thus, reflect the very diverse usages and directions toward which future research and practice will be directed

Estimación robusta en modelos ARMA bidimensionales. Aplicación al procesamiento de imágenes digitales

Este trabajo se focalizó en el problema de la estimación robusta de los parámetros en modelos autorregresivos bidimensionales con contaminación. Se propone un nuevo método de estimación robusta de los parámetros de estos modelos, denominado BMM 2D, que se basa en la representación de un proceso autoregresivo bidimensional con un modelo auxiliar. En esta tesis, se presentó un nuevo estimador para estimar los parámetros del modelo en condiciones generales de contaminación y se demostró la consistencia y la normalidad asintótica del estimador. El trabajo incluyó un análisis comparativo entre el método propuesto, los estimadores robustos existentes hasta el momento y el estimador de mínimos cuadrados, a través de un estudio de simulación de Monte Carlo. Además, se presentó una aplicación al filtrado de imágenes, que ilustra cómo funciona el estimador BMM 2D en situaciones prácticas