» Articles » PMID: 25324962

MfSBA: Multifractal Analysis of Spatial Patterns in Ecological Communities

Overview
Journal F1000Res
Date 2014 Oct 21
PMID 25324962
Authors
Affiliations
Soon will be listed here.
Abstract

Multifractals have been applied to characterize complex communities in a spatial context. They were developed for nonlinear systems and are particularly suited to capture multiplicative processes observed in ecological systems. Multifractals characterize variability in a scale-independent way within an experimental range. I have developed an open-source software package to estimate multifractals using a box-counting algorithm (available from https://github.com/lsaravia/mfsba and permanently available at doi: 10.5281/zenodo.8481). The software is specially designed for two dimensional (2D) images such as the ones obtained from remote sensing, but other 2D data types can also be analyzed. Additionally I developed a new metric to analyze MULTISPECIES SPATIAL PATTERNS WITH MULTIFRACTALS: spatial rank surface, which is included in the software.

References
1.
Borda-de-Agua L, Hubbell S, McAllister M . Species-area curves, diversity indices, and species abundance distributions: a multifractal analysis. Am Nat. 2008; 159(2):138-55. DOI: 10.1086/324787. View

2.
Plotkin J, Chave J, Ashton P . Cluster analysis of spatial patterns in Malaysian tree species. Am Nat. 2008; 160(5):629-44. DOI: 10.1086/342823. View

3.
Manor A, Shnerb N . Facilitation, competition, and vegetation patchiness: from scale free distribution to patterns. J Theor Biol. 2008; 253(4):838-42. DOI: 10.1016/j.jtbi.2008.04.012. View

4.
Weerman E, van Belzen J, Rietkerk M, Temmerman S, Kefi S, Herman P . Changes in diatom patch-size distribution and degradation in a spatially self-organized intertidal mudflat ecosystem. Ecology. 2012; 93(3):608-18. DOI: 10.1890/11-0625.1. View

5.
Lopes R, Betrouni N . Fractal and multifractal analysis: a review. Med Image Anal. 2009; 13(4):634-49. DOI: 10.1016/j.media.2009.05.003. View