
3
Collectin g and Handling Poi nt Pattern Data
This Chapter provides guidance on collec ting spatial data in surveys and experiments (Section 3.1),
wrangling the data into files and reading it into R (Sections 3.2 and 3.9–3.10), handlin g the data
in spatstat as a point pattern (Section 3 .3), c hecking for d ata errors (Section 3.4), and creating a
spatial window (Section 3.5), a pixel image (Section 3.6) , a line segment pattern (Section 3.7), or a
collection of spatial objects (Section 3.8).
3.1 Surveys and experiments
Every field of research has its own specialised methods for collecting da ta in surveys, observational
studies, an d exper iments.