Colonization rules and spatial distributions in ecology

Because they are intuitive and mathematically straight-forward, colonization rules are often used to model spatial patterns in ecology. Colonization rules assign individuals to categories according to the locations of previous colonists. In this note, a compact introduction to colonization rules in ecology is presented with implications for autocorrelation and spatial distributions. I use the colonization rule approach to unify a diverse set of spatial and species diversity analyses, exploring future extensions to incorporate greater realism.