MfSBA: Multifractal analysis of spatial patterns in ecological communities

Abstract

Multifractals have been applied to characterize complex communities in a spatial context. They were developedfor nonlinear systems and are particularly suited to capture multiplicative processes observed in ecologicalsystems. Multifractals characterize variability in a scale-independent way within an experimental range. Ihave 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 remotesensing, 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.