The spatial pattern of a forest ecosystem

Abstract Statistical analysis of stands of trees as a whole need suitable methods of spatial statistics. Obviously, trees within a stand affect development and survival of their neighbours. They interact and therefore have to be considered as a system of dependent random variates from an unknown stochastic process. One such statistical model which considers the spatial dependence among trees in a forest and their characteristics is a marked point process. The `points', called events in spatial statistics, are the tree positions and the `marks' are tree characteristics such as crown lengths or tree species. A minimal prerequisite for any serious attempt to model an observed pattern is to tes…