F1000Research (Apr 2014)

mfSBA: Multifractal analysis of spatial patterns in ecological communities [v2; ref status: indexed, http://f1000r.es/347]

  • Leonardo A. Saravia

DOI
https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.3-14.v2
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 3

Abstract

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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.

Keywords