Hello, apart from R packages, I sometimes used Ned Levine's Crimestat to carry out spatial analyses of point patterns. You might be interested in tests such as Ripley's (clumped versus random distribution of points), or global or local autocorrelation indices (sparial association between positive and negative values of a variable). ESRI ArcGIS 9 and 10 actually have some of the tests (Spatial Analyst extension), so that might be convenient if you have spatial layers as an input.
I strongly advise reading Spatial analysis in ecology (Fortin et al., 2006) as an introductory paper to the subject. Giorgio Vacchiano, PhD Università di Torino, Italy
