• Journal of Ecology and Environment
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• v.43 no.2
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• pp.191-201
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• 2019

Macroecologists and biogeographers continue to predict the distribution of species across space based on the relationship between biotic processes and environmental variables. This approach uses data related to, for example, species abundance or presence/absence, climate, geomorphology, and soils. Researchers have acknowledged in their statistical analyses the importance of accounting for the effects of spatial autocorrelation (SAC), which indicates a degree of dependence between pairs of nearby observations. It has been agreed that residual spatial autocorrelation (rSAC) can have a substantial impact on modeling processes and inferences. However, more attention should be paid to the sources of rSAC and the degree to which rSAC becomes problematic. Here, we review previous studies to identify diverse factors that potentially induce the presence of rSAC in macroecological and biogeographical models. Furthermore, an emphasis is put on the quantification of rSAC by seeking to unveil the magnitude to which the presence of SAC in model residuals becomes detrimental to the modeling process. It turned out that five categories of factors can drive the presence of SAC in model residuals: ecological data and processes, scale and distance, missing variables, sampling design, and assumptions and methodological approaches. Additionally, we noted that more explicit and elaborated discussion of rSAC should be presented in species distribution modeling. Future investigations involving the quantification of rSAC are recommended in order to understand when rSAC can have an adverse effect on the modeling process.

• Journal of the Korean association of regional geographers
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.432-442
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• 2011

Climatic variables such as temperature and precipitation tend to vary both in space and in time simultaneously. Thus, it is necessary to include space-time autocorrelation into conventional spatial interpolation methods for reliable time-series mapping. This paper introduces and applies space-time variogram modeling and space-time kriging to generate time-series temperature maps using hourly Automatic Weather System(AWS) temperature observation data for a one-month period. First, temperature observation data are decomposed into deterministic trend and stochastic residual components. For trend component modeling, elevation data which have reasonable correlation with temperature are used as secondary information to generate trend component with topographic effects. Then, space-time variograms of residual components are estimated and modelled by using a product-sum space-time variogram model to account for not only autocorrelation both in space and in time, but also their interactions. From a case study, space-time kriging outperforms both conventional space only ordinary kriging and regression-kriging, which indicates the importance of using space-time autocorrelation information as well as elevation data. It is expected that space-time kriging would be a useful tool when a space-poor but time-rich dataset is analyzed.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.24 no.5
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• pp.635-641
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• 2017

Safety service improvement and development of efficient maintenance strategies for corroded steel structures are undeniably essential. Therefore, understanding the influence of damage caused by corrosion on the remaining load-carrying capacities such as tensile strength is required. In this study, artificial neural network (ANN) approach is proposed in order to produce a simple, accurate, and inexpensive method developed by using tensile test results, material properties and finite element method (FEM) results to train the ANN model. Initially in reproducing corroded model process, FEM was used to obtain tensile strength of artificial corroded plates, for which surface is developed by a spatial autocorrelation model. By using the corroded surface data and material properties as input data, with tensile strength as the output data, the ANN model could be trained. The accuracy of the ANN result was then verified by using leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV). As a result, it was confirmed that the accuracy of the ANN approach and the final output equation was developed for predicting tensile strength without tensile test results and FEM in further work. Though previous studies have been conducted, the accuracy results are still lower than the proposed ANN approach. Hence, the proposed ANN model now enables us to have a simple, rapid, and inexpensive method to predict residual tensile strength more accurately due to corrosion in steel structures.