Abstract

Summary1. Reference (i.e. least or minimally impaired) sites can provide important information about the expected range of biological metrics and can be used to establish impairment or non‐impairment of a test site. A problem with using reference data is that biological metrics are affected by natural conditions. We present an approach that uses local information to adjust for natural conditions and a method for statistically evaluating condition at a test site using biological metrics.2. Our method consists of four steps: selection of a distance measure to find neighbours of a test site, selecting natural variables to measure the distance, selection of the number of neighbours and calculating a scored metric.3. We use a simulated example to illustrate when the nearest‐neighbour approach improves classification of sites as reference or not reference.4. Using a set of data from the Mid‐Atlantic Highlands, we show that the nearest‐neighbour method improved on the ability of a regression approach to correctly classify test sites known to be from a non‐reference group without affecting the ability to correctly classify test sites known to be from the reference group.

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