A piece of homogeneous
vegetation can be treated as a point, so it can have dynamic analysis, or trend
analysis. However, to carry enough information, this point has to be put into multi-variable
space. Thus, vegetation can be expressed as an identity, or a position vector
in multidimensional space. Furthermore, vegetation is a resource competing
system. All plant species compete for limited resources, and demands of all
species can not exceed the available resources. This can be expressed as
geometric sum of all species equal to one: Y12+Y22+..Ym2 =1, therefore, all the plant species
can be treated mutual orthogonal. When using position vector to represent
vegetation, the magnitude of the vector carries the information of the total
biomass, while the direction of the vector carries the information of
composition of vegetation, thus the position vector has to be standardized. The
vegetation growth based on cell duplication, exponential growth, is expressed
as Yk=Y0*erk. The
combination of er can be called intrinsic
changing trend. Not knowing the value of er,
changing trend can be expressed by empirical growth rate, present state over
past, Tk=Yk/Yk-1. This
trend can be used to monitor the vegetation changes and project the future
states: Yk+1=Yk*Tk.