A new digital method of data collection for spatial point pattern analysis in grassland communities

A major objective of plant ecology research is to determine the underlying processes responsible for the observed spatial distribution patterns of plant species. Plants can be approximated as points in space for this purpose, and thus, spatial point pattern analysis has become increasingly popular in ecological research. The basic piece of data for point pattern analysis is a point location of an ecological object in some study region. Therefore, point pattern analysis can only be performed if data can be collected. However, due to the lack of a convenient sampling method, a few previous studies have used point pattern analysis to examine the spatial patterns of grassland species. This is unfortunate because being able to explore point patterns in grassland systems has widespread implications for population dynamics, community-level patterns and ecological processes. In this study, we develop a new method to measure individual coordinates of species in grassland communities. This method...