During the past twenty years spatial statistics has experienced important developments and has been applied in many fields of science. In view of these facts, spatial statistics was an important topic during the theme year on statistics at the CRM in 1997-98. This volume contains 13 papers based on presentations by eminent researchers at four workshops during that year: Statistical Inference for Spatial Processes; Image Analysis; Applications of Spatial Statistics in Earth, Environmental, and Health Sciences; and Statistics of Brain Mapping. These papers range from asymptotic considerations for spatial processes to practical considerations related to particular applications including important methodological aspects. Many contributions concern image analysis, mainly images related to brain mapping.
