In geostatistics, the spatiotemporal design for data collection is central for accurate prediction and parameter inference. An important class of geostatistical models is log-Gaussian Cox process (LGCP) but there are no formal analyses on spatial or spatiotemporal survey designs for them. In this work, we study traditional balanced and uniform random designs in situations where analyst has prior information on intensity function of LGCP and show that the traditional balanced and random designs are not efficient in such situations. We also propose a new design sampling method, a rejection sampling design, which extends the traditional balanced and random designs by directing survey sites to locations that are a priori expected to provide most information. We compare our proposal to the traditional balanced and uniform random designs using the expected average predictive variance (APV) loss and the expected Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between the prior and the posterior for the LGCP intensity function in simulation experiments and in a real world case study. The APV informs about expected accuracy of a survey design in point-wise predictions and the KL-divergence measures the expected gain in information about the joint distribution of the intensity field. The case study concerns planning a survey design for analyzing larval areas of two commercially important fish stocks on Finnish coastal region. Our experiments show that the designs generated by the proposed rejection sampling method clearly outperform the traditional balanced and uniform random survey designs. Moreover, the method is easily applicable to other models in general. (C) 2019 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V.

Aim Our aim involved developing a method to analyse spatiotemporal distributions of Arctic marine mammals (AMMs) using heterogeneous open source data, such as scientific papers and open repositories. Another aim was to quantitatively estimate the effects of environmental covariates on AMMs’ distributions and to analyse whether their distributions have shifted along with environmental changes. Location Arctic shelf area. The Kara Sea. Methods Our literature search focused on survey data regarding polar bears (Ursus maritimus), Atlantic walruses (Odobenus rosmarus rosmarus) and ringed seals (Phoca hispida). We mapped the data on a grid and built a hierarchical Poisson point process model to analyse species’ densities. The heterogeneous data lacked information on survey intensity and we could model only the relative density of each species. We explained relative densities with environmental covariates and random effects reflecting excess spatiotemporal variation and the unknown, varying sampling effort. The relative density of polar bears was explained also by the relative density of seals. Results The most important covariates explaining AMMs’ relative densities were ice concentration and distance to the coast, and regarding polar bears, also the relative density of seals. The results suggest that due to the decrease in the average ice concentration, the relative densities of polar bears and walruses slightly decreased or stayed constant during the 17‐year‐long study period, whereas seals shifted their distribution from the Eastern to the Western Kara Sea. Main conclusions Point process modelling is a robust methodology to estimate distributions from heterogeneous observations, providing spatially explicit information about ecosystems and thus serves advances for conservation efforts in the Arctic. In a simple trophic system, a distribution model of a top predator benefits from utilizing prey species’ distributions compared to a solely environmental model. The decreasing ice cover seems to have led to changes in AMMs’ distributions in the marginal Arctic region.