I’ve had this idea in the back of my mind for a while. It would be an interesting problem if data were available.
At a glance a pile of moose poop might be randomly-oriented, but upon closer inspection I have found that many piles have a stacking behaviour. Those pieces of scat that arrive early may be constraining how following scat can come to rest.
Knowing whether moose scat lands in random orientation would be a first step in trying to develop a calibration between the direction that a moose was standing and the direction its scat falls.
A limitation of this approach is that if the earlier scat lands random, but the dependent scat doesn’t, then the overall non-randomness could be misleading.
Some the covariates are the ground obstacles such as rocks, logs, stumps, and vegetation, but also the ground slope, and mass.
See Seilis 2023 for some further information.