Both statistical ecology and environmental statistics have numerous challenges and opportunities in the waiting for the twenty-first century, calling for increasing numbers of nontraditional statistical approaches. Both theoretical and applied ecology are using advancing data analytical and interpretational software and hardware to satisfy public policy and discovery research, variously incorporating geospatial information, site-specific data and remote sensing imagery. We discuss a declared need for geoinformatic surveillance for spatial critical area detection. We explore, for ecological and environmental use, an innovation of the circle-based spatial scan statistic popular in the health sciences.