Heteroskedasticity as a leading indicator of desertification in spatially explicit data.

ABSTRACT: Regime shifts are abrupt transitions between alternate ecosystem states including desertification in arid regions due to drought or overgrazing. Regime shifts may be preceded by statistical anomalies such as increased autocorrelation, indicating declining resilience and warning of an impending shift. Tests for conditional heteroskedasticity, a type of clustered variance, have proven powerful leading indicators for regime shifts in time series data, but an analogous indicator for spatial data has not been evaluated. A spatial analog for conditional heteroskedasticity might be especially useful in arid environments where spatial interactions are critical in structuring ecosystem pattern and process. We tested the efficacy of a test for spatial heteroskedasticity as a leading indicator of reg

SUBMITTER: Seekell DA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4461420 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature