A geostatistical analysis of multiscale metallicity variations in galaxies – I. Introduction and comparison of high-resolution metallicity maps to an analytical metal transport model

Thanks to recent advances in integral field spectroscopy, modern surveys of nearby galaxies are capable of resolving metallicity maps of H ii regions down to scales of ∼50 pc. However, statistical analyses of these metallicity maps has seldom gone beyond fitting basic linear regressions and comparing parameters to global galaxy properties. In this paper (the first of a series), we introduce techni...