sptotal: an R package for predicting totals and weighted sums from spatial data
In ecological or environmental surveys, it is often desired to predict the mean or totalof a variable in some finite region. However, because of time and money constraints,sampling the entire region is often unfeasible. The purpose of the sptotal R package isto provide software that gives a prediction for a quantity of interest, such as a total, andan associated standard error for the prediction. The predictor, referred to as the Finite-Population-Block-Kriging (FPBK) predictor in the literature,incorporates possible spatial correlation in the data and also incorporates an appropriatevariance reduction for sampling from a finite population.In the remainder of the paper, we given an overview of the both the background of the method and of the sptotal package.