For many years, the statistical analysis of space was considered merely an application in such areas as mining, forestry, and agriculture, but over the past couple of decades, people have been gathering up methods and concepts from the scattered examples and finding enough common features to constitute a specialty within statistics. Conferences and textbooks soon followed, and here is a comprehensive account of the whole field intended as either an introduction or a reference. The three major branches--continuous spatial variation, discrete spatial variation, and spatial point patterns--provide the core of the work, but other sections cover the history, spatio-temporal processes, and additional topics such as multi-variate spatial process models and spatial aggregation and the ecological fallacy. Annotation ©2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)