Conclusion
Overall, we have shown in the methodology, results, and discussion section that:
- Tunicates and their potential independent factors are clustered in four areas in California: northern coast, San Francisco Bay, Los Angeles and San Diego
- There is an overall global regression between tunicate presence and the presence of bays, marinas, population and coast line length. Meaning there is a relation between the presence of tunicates and these factors globally, to varying degrees
- The relation between tunicates and port volume is high, although this may be because high port volume occurs in areas with a large amount of bays, harbors, marinas and population
- Bays and marinas have an overall higher effect than population density on tunicates, which is expected as population is considered as a correlating factor with the presence of bays and marinas
- There are obvious localized spatial effects between the independent factors and the presence of tunicates, showing that the GWR method is both helpful and significant to the study over a simple linear regression that accounts for these effects only on a global scale
- Tunicates are not particularly competitive with each other; that is their presence does not hinder the establishment of another species of tunicates
- A high tunicate abundance equates with a high species richness of tunicates
- Clustering is found in southern British Columbia between
Vancouver Island and the coast between boats and tunicate presence, and
we can conclude there is likely some effect between the presence of
boat traffic and tunicate species.
- We can also conclude that using both GWR for spatial regression
and CrimeStats for hotspot analyses is effective in modeling the
propagation of alien invasion and their potential correlating factors,
and would like to see future studies incorporate both of these methods
- Overall, we can conclude that spatial analysis is effective in modeling the correlations between tunicates and their possible factors, and in the future a spatial analysis would be appropriate in interpolating the expansion of these tunicates with respect to these correlated factors
