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

Quadrats are standard sampling units of relatively small, uniformly defined areas that divide a habitat of interest into subregions of equal size. They are used in ecography for 2-dimensional sampling of plants, slowmoving animals, and (more recently) microorganisms to (i) estimate population sizes when it is not feasible to measure their abundance in entirety, (ii) define the patterns of their spatial distribution, and (iii) compute species-area and distance-decay curves that define how spatial patterns of diversity and other categories of observations differ as a function of scale. All of these uses have important implications in biogeography, the conservation of biodiversity, and ecophysiological adaptations. In addition, defining these patterns contributes to our understanding of community structure and function within a landscape.