Article,
Fractal concepts in studies of soil fauna.
Geoderma, (1999)
Abstract
Despite the fact that their objects of study live in a highly complex
and irregular environment,
soil zoologists have not yet made use of the advantage of fractal
geometry in their work. Less than
1% of papers published during the last 3 years that dealt with fractal
applications in the field of
biological and environmental sciences were directed at studies of
soil fauna. This paper tries to
initiate a more intensive use of fractals in soil zoology and outlines
their potential for different
aspects of research. It reviews a fractal approach to describe soil
nematode movement patterns in
an artificial two-dimensional soil matrix and presents original work
on the impact of habitat
complexity on the abundance:body size distribution of soil microarthropods
and on the potential of
detecting scaling regions of microarthropod aggregations by identifying
scale-dependent changes
of a fractal exponent.
Tags
- abundance:body-size
- animal
- complexity;
- distribution;
- fauna;
- fractals;
- habitat
- movement;
- regions
- scaling
- soil
