La autocorrelación espacial y el desarrollo de la geografía cuantitativa

How does ONE phenomenon vary across geographical space? This is the question that helps solve spatial autocorrelation. This editorial presents a brief introduction to the concept of spatial autocorrelation and a set of methods of analysis used to classify and quantify the behaviour of a geographical phenomenon across space. In addition, it presents a historical contextualization of its origin and development, and a series of elements that are expected to clarify possible confusions between spatial correlation and spatial autocorrelation. The descriptions and concepts exposed here are not developed with mathematical rigour nor detailing the formalization of each method, in contrast, they are presented as a conceptual discussion that describes the foundations and details that are considered fundamental to understand the basis of the main spatial statistical methods so far developed to analyse the variation of geographical phenomena. The aim of these notes is to support introductory spatial analysis courses.