Morphing plots--an Alternative Approach

One possible way of keeping the 40 by thrown out the inscribed-square procedure is to find a different way to turn a circular plot into a square plot. It may be possible to construct a one-to-one transformation between the coordinates of a fifth-acre circular plot and the coordinates of a square plot of the same area!

This procedure would create a certain degree of `distortion' in the physical location of the trees within a plot, but if criteria were established to minimize this distortion (for example, defining a concept of `density' so that all points in the range of this transformation would have the same density) statistical tests could be made to insure that the distortion was kept at an acceptable level.

As the size of the pseudoplot shrinks due to the recently discovered problems, it becomes increasingly important that we use all data that are available to us.