Construction of Multidimensional Clustered Patterns

Ecological processes often depend upon the patterning, as well as the absolute density, of resources. In this paper, we develop methods for describing pattern from the perspective of the organism encountering and exploiting the resources, and for reconstructing pattern from the description. The essence of our description is the structure function, which is the probability that a point r units away from the current point contains resources, conditional on the resource state of the current point. We first show how the structure function is determined from pattern and then describe an algorithm (the method of the Force to be Full) for constructing pattern in any number of dimensions from a given structure function. We illustrate our ideas with empirical data for krill surveys and with simulated but complex three—dimensional patterns. See full-text article at JSTOR