FRACTAL STUDIES ON THE SPATIAL PATTERNS OF TREES:
A CASE STUDY OF KHAO-YAI NATIONAL PARK, THAILAND
The distribution of the trees in a 600 m x 500 m (30 ha) plot in the Khao Yai National Park in Thailand containing 16,375 trees, divided into 63 families and 182 species is studied. The allometric scaling exponent in the relation between the numbers and diameters of all the trees taken as one group was -2.155 with R2 = 0.9873. The spatial heterogeneity of the forest is seen in the variation of this scaling exponent determined for each ha in the area of study. The box counting method (BCM) was used to determine the fractal dimensions (df) of the spatial patterns of the trees. The spatial pattern for all the trees taken as a whole has a df = 1.61. The fractal dimensions for the patterns of the six most abundant species and the six most abundant families ranged from 1.731 to 1.747. All of the values were within the standard deviation in the BCM calculations of the df’s. This points to a universal value of 7/4 for the df of the trees patterns in the Khao Yai National Park.
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