Hi Jessica,
Interesting research!
Just curious, how did you decide where to trawl? Are the locations based on a random sampling scheme? I ask, because if there are any biases in your sampling scheme (you only collected turtles where it was convenient, or where you knew you would find them, etc... vs systematically, or using some kind of random sampling scheme), this may impact how you can interpret your results.
I'm also curious about what motivates your questions:
Is there clustering of turtles?
Is there clustering of high catches?
How is knowing that information helpful to your broader research (I ask because it is interesting to me, but also because sometimes it impacts how you set your data up for analysis)?
When you say "Is there clustering of turtles?" I'm wondering how that differs from "Is there clustering of high catches?" Are you looking at two different datasets? Are you considering presence/absense (rather than the number of turtles found at each point) for the "clustering of turtles" part of the analysis?
I look forward to learning more about your research and will happily help if I can.
Best wishes,
Lauren
Lauren M. Scott, PhD
Esri
Geoprocessing, Spatial Statistics