eCite Digital Repository
A simple method for measuring the bilateral symmetry of leaves
Citation
Shi, P and Zheng, X and Ratkowsky, DA and Li, Y and Wang, P and Cheng, L, A simple method for measuring the bilateral symmetry of leaves, Symmetry, 10, (4) Article 118. ISSN 2073-8994 (2018) [Refereed Article]
![]() | PDF 950Kb |
Copyright Statement
Copyright 2018 The Authors. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Abstract
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 Details
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 |
Repository Staff Only: item control page