This book is designed to help the reader understand the concepts and methods of spatial pattern analysis. The book is divided into three sections of three Chapters each. The first three Chapters lay the foundations of the material by discussing the basic concepts, considerations for the acquisition of data, and the basic methods for a single species in one dimension, concentrating on data from strings of contiguous quadrats. The middle third of the book describes extensions of the basic methods to the analysis of two species, of multiple species and of data used to investigate two-dimensional patterns. The last three Chapters describe different aspects of spatial pattern analysis: point pattern data, pattern on environmental gradients and future extensions of pattern analysis.

The book is written in the first person plural throughout, not as an affectation, but because the material presented here is not the work of just one person, but of a whole group of people who have contributed to the overall research program. That group includes students and associates whose names will be obvious from the citations: Dan MacIsaac, Dave Blundon, Elizabeth John, Maria Zbigniewicz, Rob Powell, Colin Young, and so on. Other students and researchers have allowed us to use their data for illustrative purposes and these include John Stadt and Michael Hunt Jones.

The book does not present the material with a thoroughly consistent notation. This was a deliberate decision, based on the reasoning that a book-wide notation would be forced to be elaborate and thus eventually clumsy.