What are the alpha shapes?: “The concept of alpha shapes formalizes the intuitive notion of “shape” for spatial point set data, which occurs frequently in the computational sciences. An alpha shape is a concrete geometric object that is uniquely defined for a particular point set. Alpha shapes are generalizations of the convex hull. Given a 

Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).