wjf_Sandwich_EPA131030英文版.pdfVIP

Environment and Planning A 2013, volume 45, pages 2515 – 2534 doi:10.1068/a44710 Sandwich estimation for multi-unit reporting on a stratified heterogeneous surface Jin-Feng Wang LREIS, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Nature Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, PR China; e-mail: wangjf@L Robert Haining Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 3EN, England; e-mail: rph26@cam.ac.uk Tie-Jun Liu, Lian-Fa Li, Cheng-Sheng Jiang LREIS, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Nature Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, PR China; e-mail: liutj@L, lilf@L, jiangcs@L Received 31 December 2011; in revised form 17 October 2012 Abstract. Spatial sampling is widely used in environmental and social research. In this paper we consider the situation where instead of a single global estimate of the mean of an attribute for an area, estimates are required for each of many geographically defined reporting units (such as counties or grid cells) because their means cannot be assumed to be the same as the global figure. Not only may survey costs greatly increase if sample size has to be a function of the number of reporting units, estimator sampling error tends to be large if the population attribute of each reporting unit can be estimated by using only those samples actually lying inside the unit itself. This study proposes a computationally simple approach to multi-unit reporting by using analysis of variance and incorporating ‘twice-stratified’ statistics. We assume that, although the area is heterogeneous (the mean varies across the area), it can be zoned (or stratified) into homogeneous subareas (the mean is constant within each subarea) and, in addition, that it is possible to acquire prior knowledge about this partition. This zoning of the study area is independent of the reporting units. Th