Zeitschrift für Ökosystem und Ökologie

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CMEIAS Quadrat Maker: A Digital Software Tool to Optimize Grid Dimensions and Produce Quadrat Images for Landscape Ecology Spatial Analysis

Frank B. Dazzo and Colin Gross

This paper describes CMEIAS Quadrat Maker, a new digital computing tool designed to alleviate the nontrivial problem of optimizing the grid-lattice dimensions and automating the production of size-optimized quadrat images for plot-based spatial pattern analysis in landscape ecology. The program is written for 32-bit and 64-bit Window’s operating systems and handles both 8-bit grayscale and 24-bit color input images. Following a brief user interaction, the software application transforms a copy of the input landscape image into an annotated, color index image with optimized grid overlay and column-row labeling of individual quadrats, cuts a copy of the landscape image into quadrats defined by the optimized grid raster, and then saves each individual quadrat image with a file name indicating its unique location within the landscape domain, now ready for stack building and automated image analysis. Version 1.0 of this computing technology is implemented into a software package containing the executable file, user manual and tutorial images that will be freely available at http://cme.msu.edu/cmeias/. This new computing technology will facilitate quadrat-based analyses of how spatial patterns vary with the scale at which they are measured, and will also strengthen microscopy-based approaches for understanding the spatial ecology of microbial biofilm communities.