Multivariate Analysis of Ecological Communities

'... this text is certainly one of the best, and it complements the others currently available.' Ecology ' ... The authors succeed in their goal of bringing together familiar and unfamiliar techniques in a way that is valuable to both ecologists and statisticians. The strengths of the book are the diversity of techniques and strong emphasis on graphics. In this book, statisticians will find clear descriptions of ecological analyses and ecologists will find a wealth of useful ideas.' American Scientist '..valuable for everybody interested in multivariate techniques and their application to community studies..' Acta Botanica Hungarica

• 1 Ecological data.- 1.1 Types of data.- 1.2 Forms of data.- 1.3 Standardization and transformation of data.- 1.4 Constructing association data.- 2 Preliminary inspection of data.- 2.1 Displaying data values.- 2.2 Mapping.- 2.3 Displaying distributions of variables.- 2.4 Bivariate and multivariate displays.- 3 Ordination.- 3.1 Direct gradient analysis.- 3.2 Principal components analysis.- 3.3 Correspondence analysis.- 3.4 Ordination methods when rows or columns are grouped.- 3.5 Principal coordinates analysis.- 3.6 The horseshoe effect.- 3.7 Non-metric ordination.- 3.8 Case studies.- 4 Methods for comparing ordinations.- 4.1 Procrustes rotation.- 4.2 Generalized Procrustes analysis.- 4.3 Comparing ordination methods by multiple Procrustes analysis.- 5 Classification.- 5.1 Agglomerative hierarchical methods.- 5.2 Divisive hierarchical methods.- 5.3 Non-hierarchical classification.- 5.4 Visual displays for classification.- 5.5 Case study.- 5.6 Methods for comparing classifications.- 6 Analysis of asymmetry.- 6.1 Row and column plots.- 6.2 Skew-symmetry analysis.- 6.3 Case studies.- 6.4 A proof of the triangle-area theorem.- 7 Computing.- 7.1 Computing options.- 7.2 Examples of Genstat programs.- 7.3 Handling missing values.- 7.4 Conclusion.- 7.5 List of software.- References.- Appendix Matrix algebra.- A.1 Matrices and vectors.- A.2 Particular forms of matrices.- A.3 Simple matrix operations.- A.4 Simple geometry and some special matrices.- A.5 Matrix inversion.- A.6 Scalar functions of matrices.- A.7 Orthogonal matrices.- A.8 Matrix decompositions.- A.9 Conclusion.