Figure 1

Box-counting algorithm. (a) Representation of the the box-counting algorithm applied to the 2006 occurrences of the Snowy Plover (SNPL), Piping Plover (PIPL), and Red Knot (REKN), for eight orders of magnitude (in a logarithmic scale), which corresponds to 5000 resolutions of the box-counting grid. In this example at the resolution of box B5 the number of boxes in which there is at least one occurrence is N(B 5)=6. (b) Box-counting example applied to the whole coastline, to the habitat-specific coastline (e.g., beach, salt-marsh), and to other land cover classes as in Convertino et al. (2011b). Many coastal wetland types are included in the land cover, such as swamp, cypress swamp, mangrove, and salt marsh. The shaded grid cells in (a) and (b) have at least one species occurrence or a coastline segment at the represented resolution. Two coastline configurations are presented: the first for high values of D _f and D _K (c), the second for low values of D _f and D _K (d). The patches presented in green are connected because their neighboring distance is lower than the maximum dispersal length d _l .