Community Analysis

These are slides for my lectures on multivariate methods in ecology (January, 2009).

Lecture themes:

These are all pdf files: Beware!

2009 Lectures

• Ordination I: unconstrained methods
• Ordination II: constrained ordination and analysis of distances
• Classification Old lectures (I may have no time for these in 2009)

Old Lectures

While stuff here is old, it may still be useful if you want to go deep into ordination.

1. Not lectured in 2009: Site description: Diversity, evenness etc., species abundance models.
2. Not lectured in 2009: Gradient analysis: Basic concepts, weighted averages in bioindication, response models, beta diversity.
3. Ordination: Basic methods. PCA, CA, MDS etc., problems and solutions.
4. Ordination and environment: Interpreting ordination diagrams, Constrained ordination (CCA). The division of two ordination chapters is somewhat arbitrary, but ordination was growing too big, and I chopped it here.
5. Evaluation and comparision of ordination methods: Explains how ordination is related to the gradient thinking, and how ordination methods should be evaluated for their ability to find gradients.
6. Classification: Cluster analysis (one of the least satisfactory parts, but first I should study classification more deeply).
7. Data Import to R: An appendix.
8. Everything + notes (1.8MB): I made a first quick pass over all notes, and added some comments. These comments are pretty boring and usually tell how to do things in R. The slides are reduced to fit two to the page, with comments near to them.

Tutorial for computer Lab

The tutorials used in practicals:

1. Unconstrained ordination: Base text, Text with results, The R commands of tutorials
2. Constrained ordination: Base text, Text with results, The R commands of tutorials
3. Classification: Base text, Text with results, The R commands of tutorials

• vegan help (local html files)

A longer and deeper tutorial is available for those who are keenly interested in multivariate methods:

• Vegan tutorial (pdf file)