Geostatistics in Entomology

WHAT IS GEOSTATISTICS:

• a branch of Geology born in the 1960s that deals with the analysis of mining processes through mathematical models (Krige 1960; Matheron 1965)
• it is currently applied in disciplines such as hydrogeology, hydrology, meteorology, geochemistry, forestry, landscape ecology, agriculture and also Entomology (Jeffery et al. 2002, Ryan et al.2004 ) and medical sciences (Epidemiology)
• Assign position in space to ecological phenomena and allow to produce prediction maps (kriging interpolation)
• Kriging is a method of interpolation which predicts unknown values from data observed at known locations using a mathematical model (variogram) to express the spatial variation , and it minimizes the error of predicted values.