Data analysis in vegetation ecology

Abstract

Abstract This book contains 14 chapters discussing vegetation ecology, which is conceived of as a discipline analysing multiple vectors of species or plant traits jointly with environmental variables in space and time. Chapter 2 discusses patterns in vegetation ecology. Mathematical analysis starts with Chapter 3 on transformation, allowing adjustment of the data to the objective of the investigation, while also overcoming restrictions imposed by measurement tools. In Chapter 4, multivariate comparison is presented. Many of the subsequent analyses directly access similarity matrices, such as classification (Chapter 5), showing groups instead of single releves, ordination (Chapter 6), showing similarity in reduced dimensional space and ranking, allowing the identification of releves or species considered important in the given context. Chapter 7 is devoted to the comparison of patterns, being biological, environmental, spatial or temporal. In Chapter 8, this is extended to various alternative vegetation descriptors, such as plant traits and indicator values. The analysis of temporal patterns is shown in Chapter 10 and it is related to static (Chapter 9) and dynamic (Chapter 11) modelling, of which the very basic principles as well as examples are shown. Finally, two case studies illustrate practical issues through specific data sets: the revision of a classification of wetland vegetation in Switzerland in Chapter 12 as an example of using databases, and the analysis of forest vegetation data in Chapter 13, focusing on the interpretation of ecological patterns. Chapter 14 presents a newly emerging free software that may redirect towards ever-growing all-purpose statistical method for vegetation ecology.