A Statistical Test for Ripley’sKFunction Rejection of Poisson Null Hypothesis

Ripley’s \ud835\udc3e function is the classical tool to characterize the spatial structure of point patterns. It is widely used in vegetation studies. Testing its values against a null hypothesis usually relies on Monte-Carlo simulations since little is known about its distribution. We introduce a statistical test against complete spatial randomness (CSR). The test returns the \ud835\udc43 value to reject the null hypothesis of independence between point locations. It is more rigorous and faster than classical Monte-Carlo simulations. We show how to apply it to a tropical forest plot. The necessary R code is provided