Spatial Regression Modeling for Compositional Data with Many Zeros

Compositional data analysis considers vectors of nonnegative-valued variables subject to a unit-sum constraint. Our interest lies in spatial compositional data, in particular, land use/land cover (LULC) data in the northeastern United States. Here, the observations are vectors providing the proportions of LULC types observed in each 3 km×3 km grid cell, yielding order 104 cells. On the same grid cells, we have an additional compositional dataset supplying forest fragmentation proportions. Potentially useful and available covariates include elevation range, road length, population, median household income, and housing levels.