Species Accumulation Curve — Ecological Sampling Simulator

Field ecologists rarely find every species on the first visit. This simulator hides a synthetic community — a chosen number of species scattered with tunable spatial clustering — across an 8×8 grid of quadrat plots rendered in 3D, and lets you survey it one plot at a time. Each sampled plot lights up green and reveals the individuals actually found there, colored by species, while a live species-accumulation curve tracks cumulative richness against plots sampled. A real incidence-based Chao2 estimator recomputes after every plot from the count of species seen exactly once versus exactly twice, showing how statistical extrapolation closes the gap between what you've observed and the landscape's true hidden richness — and how sampling order and spatial clustering change how fast that gap closes.