R as a GIS: illustrating scale and aggregation problems with forest fire data

Using the R language as a GIS applied on forest fire data in South of France, the goal of the research is to emphasize how spatial statistics may depend on the areal units chosen. First, we propose to map the forest fire data at different scale levels based on administrative boundaries. Second, we measure the MAUP by showing scale sensitivity in descriptive statistics and in regression analyses. Finally, although many tools can be used for vector or raster data aggregation and mapping, we discuss why we choose R as a primary analysis tool and R added-value.