Multifractal pattern and process during a recent period of forest expansion in a temperate mountainous region of China

Understanding the mechanisms that drive spatial pattern change over space and time is a central goal of landscape ecology, but these patterns are often complex. Multifractals, an extension of the concept of fractal geometry, is especially suited to the description of complex pattern. In our paper, we examine the scaling properties of forest spatial pattern over 32 years of forest expansion in a warm temperate deciduous forest near Beijing city using multifractal analysis. An idealized fractal growth model was used to simulate spatial patterns and to link patterns to processes. We show that the despite substantial increases in forest cover, the scaling properties of the spatial pattern of the forest landscape remains similar over time. The variance of Rényi spectra among different years implied that the changes in the forest landscape over time may be a fractal growth process. The fact that these scaling behaviors persist across a heterogeneous landscape suggests that simple rules could exist for some processes of forest expansion, facilitating prediction and further modeling efforts.

► Power law based multifractal model was applied to evaluate forest expansion.
► Scaling properties of forest expansion and the fractal growth process were examined.
► The results implied that the forest expansion may be a fractal growth process.
► The work suggested that simple rules could exist for forest expansion.