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spsurvey: Spatial Sampling Design and Analysis in R
Citation:
Dumelle, M., T. Kincaid, A. Olsen, AND M. Weber. spsurvey: Spatial Sampling Design and Analysis in R. Journal of Statistical Software. American Statistical Association, Alexandria, VA, 105(3):1-29, (2023). https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v105.i03
Impact/Purpose:
The spsurvey R package is used to design and analyze monitoring surveys. spsurvey let the user implement complicated statistical approaches in an easy-to-use framework, leading to better sampling plans and analysis approaches. To date, the spsurvey R package has been downloaded nearly 80,000 times by researchers inside of and outside of EPA. Notably, spsurvey is used to design and analyze the National Acquatic Resource Surveys (NARS) at EPA. The newest update to spsurvey is version 5.0, which provides several new features and quality of life upgrades to spsurvey.
Description:
spsurvey is an R package for design-based statistical inference, with a focus on spatial data. spsurvey provides the generalized random-tessellation stratified (GRTS) algorithm to select spatially balanced samples via the grts() function. The grts() function flexibly accommodates several sampling design features, including stratification, varying inclusion probabilities, legacy (or historical) sites, minimum distances between sites, and two options for replacement sites. spsurvey also provides a suite of data analysis options, including categorical variable analysis (cat_analysis()), continuous variable analysis (cont_analysis()), relative risk analysis (relrisk_analysis()), attributable risk analysis (attrisk_analysis()), difference in risk analysis (diffrisk_analysis()), change analysis (change_analysis()), and trend analysis (trend_analysis()). In this manuscript, we first provide background for the GRTS algorithm and the analysis approaches and then show how to implement them in spsurvey. We find that the spatially balanced GRTS algorithm yields more precise parameter estimates than simple random sampling, which ignores spatial information.
