Why Geography Matters
Every topic under study will never be independent of the area it is located in. “Analysts all must carefully consider the ‘geography’ of their problem, and what effects that geography alone may have on their analyses” (Klinkenberg 2017).
There is no single natural scale at which ecological phenomena should be studied, but there are characteristic domains at which to look at. If you change the scale of reference, the phenomena of interest changes.
Some characteristic scales:
- some things share a resource, a simple selection. Ex. a patch like a rocky tidal zone.
- complementary selection, patches and the matrix. Ex, a cougar whose habitat has a broad range.
- geographical profiling. Ex, a marauder, a person who is likely to be somewhere, a criminal who only works in a certain area.
Basically, scale all depends on what you are trying to figure out, what is most important for the study. Multiscale studies become complicated because, at different scales, different attributes come into play. As you increase your extent, new interactions emerge (emergent processes).
One of the better-known problems in geography is the modifiable aerial unit problem or MAUP. MAUP is a source of statistical bias that can significantly impact the results of statistical hypothesis tests. MAUP affects results when point-based measures of spatial phenomena are aggregated into districts, for example, population density or illness rates.
There is also the Simpson’s paradox, in which a trend appears in different groups of data but disappears or reverses when these groups are combined. For example, “if the value of one variable varies in correlation with another (e.g., high areas of unemployment are often found in areas with a high number of a particular social-economic characteristic), then it may be impossible to obtain a reliable estimate of the true correlation between the two variables” (Klinkenberg lecture notes 2017).
The main take away from this lecture is whatever your scale, your topic of study will never be independent of the space it occupies. You must fully understand your study area and all relevant interactions at play in order to come away with any meaningful truthful analysis.