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Many plant leaves exhibit bilateral symmetry, but such symmetry has rarely been measured because of the lack of practical methods. We propose a simple method for achieving the above objective. A leaf is divided into left and right sides, and several equally-sized strips are generated to intersect each side of that leaf to generate pairwise left and right sub-regions. A standardized index (SI) for measuring bilateral symmetry is built based on the left–right areal differences of those sub-regions. The leaves of 10 species of plants were sampled for testing the method’s validity. Based on the experimental data, we compared the root-mean-squared error (RMSE), SI, and areal ratio (AR) of the left side to the right side of the leaf. The SI measures the bilateral symmetry of plant leaves well, and it is better than the RMSE and AR for eliminating the effect of leaf size on the goodness of fit. The SI proposed here is the best indicator for evaluating the degree of bilateral symmetry and can be potentially used for comparing the difference in the bilateral symmetry of leaves of different plants.

Item Type:	Refereed Article
Keywords:	leaf area, leaf size, mirror image, spatstat, standardized index
Research Division:	Mathematical Sciences
Research Group:	Numerical and computational mathematics
Research Field:	Numerical and computational mathematics not elsewhere classified
Objective Division:	Plant Production and Plant Primary Products
Objective Group:	Other plant production and plant primary products
Objective Field:	Other plant production and plant primary products not elsewhere classified
UTAS Author:	Ratkowsky, DA (Dr David Ratkowsky)
ID Code:	125680
Year Published:	2018
Web of Science® Times Cited:	18
Deposited By:	TIA - Research Institute
Deposited On:	2018-04-30
Last Modified:	2019-03-20
Downloads:	96 View Download Statistics