Inventory of methods for comparing spatial patterns in raster data

Comparison of spatial patterns in raster data is a part of many types of spatial analysis. With this task, we want to know how the physical arrangement of observations in one raster differs from the physical arrangement of observations in another raster.

This blog post series will explain the motivation for comparing spatial patterns in raster data, the general considerations when selecting a method for comparison, and the inventory of methods for comparing spatial patterns in raster data. Next, it will show how to use R to compare spatial patterns in continuous and categorical raster data. Lastly, it will discuss the methods’ properties, their applicability, and how they can be extended.

In general, four main reasons for comparing spatial patterns in raster data were identified by Long and Robertson (2018, https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12356):

For now, I want to focus on the situation in which only two rasters are compared at a time.1 Then, we can think about comparing spatial patterns in raster data as the type of operation that is performed:

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