Spatial Analysis - The History of The Spatial Analysis

The History of The Spatial Analysis

Spatial analysis can perhaps be considered to have arisen with the early attempts at cartography and surveying but many fields have contributed to its rise in modern form. Biology contributed through botanical studies of global plant distributions and local plant locations, ethological studies of animal movement, landscape ecological studies of vegetation blocks, ecological studies of spatial population dynamics, and the study of biogeography. Epidemiology contributed with early work on disease mapping, notably mapping an outbreak of cholera, with research on mapping the spread of disease and with locational studies for health care delivery. Statistics has contributed greatly through work in spatial statistics. Economics has contributed notably through spatial econometrics. Geographic information system is currently a major contributor due to the importance of geographic software in the modern analytic toolbox. Remote sensing has contributed extensively in morphometric and clustering analysis. Computer science has contributed extensively through the study of algorithms, notably in computational geometry. Mathematics continues to provide the fundamental tools for analysis and to reveal the complexity of the spatial realm, for example, with recent work on fractals and scale invariance. Scientific modelling provides a useful framework for new approaches.

Read more about this topic:  Spatial Analysis

Famous quotes containing the words the history, history and/or analysis:

    Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.
    Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)

    History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
    But what experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.
    Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)

    ... the big courageous acts of life are those one never hears of and only suspects from having been through like experience. It takes real courage to do battle in the unspectacular task. We always listen for the applause of our co-workers. He is courageous who plods on, unlettered and unknown.... In the last analysis it is this courage, developing between man and his limitations, that brings success.
    Alice Foote MacDougall (1867–1945)