1. Spatial point patterns represent collections of entities where the geographical locations of the entities are of primary interest, rather than any quantitative or qualitative attribute of the entity itself. A familiar example is a map of all trees in a forest stand, wherein the data consists of a list of trees referenced by their geographical locations. The goal is to determine whether the points are more or less clustered than expected by chance and/or to find the spatial scale(s) at which the points tend to be nonrandomly distributed .