mfSBA: Multifractal analysis of spatial patterns in ecological communities

Multifractals have been applied to characterize complex communities in a spatial context. They were developed for nonlinear systems and are particularly suited to capture multiplicative processes observed in ecological systems. Multifractals characterize variability in a scale-independent way within an experimental range. I have developed an open-source software package to estimate multifractals using a box-counting algorithm (available from https://github.com/lsaravia/mfsba and permanently available at doi: 10.5281/zenodo.8481 ). The software is specially designed for two dimensional (2D) images such as the ones obtained from remote sensing, but other 2D data types can also be analyzed. Additionally I developed a new metric to analyze multispecies spatial patterns with multifractals: spatial rank surface, which is included in the software.