Spatio-Temporal patterns of Barmah Forest Virus Disease: spatial autocorrelation analysis for BFV disease in Queensland, 1993-2008

The dataset comes from a study investigating the spatio-temporal patterns of Barmah Forest Virus (BFV) disease in Queensland and provides the spatial autocorrelation analysis for BFV disease across the area.The global Moran's I test statistic was used to assess the presence of significant spatial autocorrelation of BFV disease incidence rates in four different periods of 1993–1996, 1997–2000, 2001–2004 and 2005–2008. Moran's I ranges from −1 to 1: a value close to 0 indicates spatial randomness while a positive value indicates positive spatial autocorrelation. Statistical significance was tested using randomisation based on 999 permutations. The weight distance matrix, essential for the computation of spatial autocorrelation statistics, was based on Queen contiguity and Euclidean distance.