Plant cover

[3] The most common way to measure plant cover in herbal plant communities, is to make a visual assessment of the relative area covered by the different species in a small plot (see quadrat).

The visually assessed cover of a plant species is then recorded as a continuous variable between 0 and 1, or divided into interval classes as an ordinal variable.

In a pin-point analysis, a frame with a fixed grid pattern is placed randomly above the vegetation, and a thin pin is inserted vertically through one of the grid points into the vegetation.

The different species touched by the pin are recorded at each insertion.

Since a single pin in multi-species plant communities often will hit more than a single species, the sum of the plant cover of the different species may be larger than unity when estimated by the pin-point method.