lacunarlike

Lacunarlike is an informal adjective used to describe patterns, textures, or spatial arrangements that resemble lacunae—gaps or voids—distributed across scales. It signals that a pattern is not uniformly filled but contains irregular, multi-scale absence of material or occupancy.

In fractal geometry and texture analysis, lacunarity measures the variation in gap sizes and their distribution. A lacunarlike pattern thus refers to a structure whose voids create a heterogeneous texture, with large and small gaps coexisting rather than a uniform fill.

Lacunarlike characteristics appear in diverse areas, including ecological patterns with clumps and clearings, porous materials with variable pore sizes, geological fracture networks, and complex textures in digital images used for analysis or classification.

As a descriptive term, lacunarlike is often used alongside lacunarity metrics, computed through methods such as gliding-box or box-counting analyses across scales. It is not a formal mathematical term on its own, but it helps communicate the presence of multi-scale gaps and textural heterogeneity. Related topics include lacunarity, fractal geometry, and texture analysis.