Model-Based Spatial Data Fusion

With increased data collection, the need to fuse data sources has emerged as an important and rapidly growing research activity in the statistical community. In considering spatial and spatio-temporal datasets to examine complex environmental and ecological processes of interest, we often have multiple sources that are jointly informative about features of interest of the processes. Model-based data fusion aims to leverage information from these sources to improve inference and prediction. In the spatial statistics setting, these data could be geostatistical; areal; or point patterns with varying spatial resolutions, supports, and domains. Given two or more sources, we explore stochastic modeling to implement a suitable fusion with full inference and uncertainty quantification. We illustrate these ideas using three environmental and ecological examples: precipitation, marine mammal abundance, and joint species distributions.