G 410/510 GIS for the Natural Sciences
D. Percy
e-mail: percyd@pdx.edu

Spring Term 1999

Quadrat Analysis

A first cut at analysing the distribution of points

You are going to compare the distribution of points with a theoretical Poisson distribution (random) and use a Chi-Squared statistical test to see if there is a significant difference.

  1. Use the gridmaker.ave script (located in the samples directory) to create a grid over the state. Make this script the "apply" action on a new button in the view. You get to this by double-clicking the toolbar, then selecting tool from the dropdown menu. (I'll show you in class).
  2. Use the Theme-> Select by Theme function to do a spatial query of all grids that intersect the state (assuming that you drew your box larger than the state). Save this as a new theme. We won't worry about the boundary problem.

  3. Open the Table for this new theme, open the table for the earthquakes theme and do a spatial join by clicking on the Shape field in each table and clicking the join button.

  4. Click on the field Label and choose Summarize from the Field menu. Accept the defaults in the dialog box. This gives you a table of how many   earthquakes occured in each grid cell.

  5. Now join the summarized table back to your grid table so that you will have a list of all the grid cells and how many earthquakes are in each. Now you can plot a graduated color map of earthquake occurence, which will be less busy visually than plotting all of the earthquakes. Cool, huh? Summarize this table in the same way that you did in step 3, but this time summarize on the field Count.

  6. Export the summarized table to DBF so that you can import it to Excel.

  7. Download my Poisson example spreadsheet. For a quadrat analysis you need to have at least 5 events in a category. You will probably combine all of the categories above a certain value. For my 50 x 50 example I combined everything above 5. Remember that the sum of all probabilities in the Poisson distribution is 1. I'll cover the details in class.

  8. Alter the spreadsheet to accomodate the grid size that you used. Your Chi Square value should be pretty large, since this is obviously a clustered data set!