If in addition a high spatiogenetic correlation would exist, this would indicate a consistent spatial arrangement of these groups in the sense that on the average spatially neighboring groups are genetically more similar than spatially distant groups.
If neighboring areas are more similar, we would obtain a positive spatial autocorrelation which might violate the assumption that the observation values in each sample are independent of each other.
However, more recent work has found strong spatial autocorrelation in many microbial communities, such that spatially close communities are more similar than expected by chance, and this similarity decays with distance (Ettema and Wardle 2002).
Results indicate that ForestSimMPB model representations of MPB outbreaks are more similar than Random model representations to the spatial distribution of MPB-dead trees.
The resulting graph often has better detection power than the true graph, enabling more timely detection of outbreaks, while achieving similar spatial accuracy to the true graph.
The most crucial properties of spatial data are spatial dependence (near things tend to be more similar than distant things) and non-stationarity (inconstant variability of phenomena across space) [ 18].
Resistance levels were more similar among the nearest flocks, suggesting a contagious spatial distribution of resistance (i.e., resistance at neighbouring farms was not independent from one another).
Although there was some evidence that sampling rates in the fallen stock survey became more uniform during 2003 2005, it is likely that similar spatial distributions will continue if not actively corrected in sympathy with disease occurrence.
Both species' final models incorporated a spatial random effect to describe spatial autocorrelation, whereby schools located closely together were more similar than schools at greater distance.
