Assessing the clonal expansion strategy of landscape-forming plants

Vegetated coastal landscapes are often formed by clonally expanding plants. By developing rhizomes or stolons these plants can spread laterally and distribute themselves in space. In this protocol we describe a method for deriving the clonal expanding strategy of dune grasses from still images. First we will discuss a more labour intensive method that requires the excavation and reconstruction of a clonal network. Second, we will discuss a validated automated approach based on two connecting algorithms that allows for a less time-consuming expansion of a dataset.