Figure 3

Inference for Moran’s I statistic. Inference for the Moran’s I is based on a random permutation procedure which recalculates the Moran’s I statistic a number of times and then generates a reference distribution. This is illustrated in Figure 3. The initial Moran’s I (yellow vertical line in Figure 3) is then compared to this reference distribution (brown distribution in Figure 3), and a pseudo significance level is calculated [25]. The Moran’s I statistic is highly significant at the 0.1% significance level, after 999 permutations. This implies that the observed positive spatial autocorrelation is very significant.