The Line Transect: Recording How a Community Changes

Random quadrats answer 'how much is there'. They are the wrong tool for 'how does it change as you walk from the stream to the hilltop', because scattering samples at random throws away the very ordering you are asking about. A transect is a line laid deliberately ACROSS a gradient — a shoreline, a path edge, a slope, a woodland margin — with records taken at intervals along it. The result is a profile: which species give way to which, and where the change happens. Zonation on a rocky shore is the classic example, and the same method reads a hedge bank, a trampled path, or the edge of a mulched bed. It is the cheapest way to turn 'the plants are different over there' into a diagram with distances on it.