The Use of Fractals to Assess the Ecological Impact of Increased Cattle Population: Case Study from the Runde Communal Land, Zimbabwe

1. This paper presents a methodology that measures mathematically the stability of patches of vegetation (e.g. grass, densely wooded) identified from remotely sensed data. Following Hastings et al. (1982), the methodology uses an empirical exponent B to measure the distribution of patch sizes, and a related (Mandelbrot 1983) fractal exponent H to measure the relative long-term stability. The value H=1/2 corresponds to a Markov process, H>1/2 corresponds to a more stable process and H<1/2 corresponds to a less stable process. The larger the value of H, the greater the relative stability