14.3 Support

By support of data we mean the physical size (length, area, volume) associated with an individual observational unit

• It is possible to represent the support of areal data by a point, despite the fact that the data have polygonal support
• When the intrinsic support of the data is represented as points, but the underlying process is between proximate observations rather than driven chiefly by distance between observations
• risk of misrepresenting the footprint of the underlying spatial processes