Chapter 17 Summary

Ordination is a powerful statistical tecnhique for studying the relationships of objects characterized by several descriptors (e.g. sites described by biotic communities, or environmental variables), but serveral ordination methods exist. These methods mainly differ in the type of distance preserved, the type of variables allowed and the dimensions of the ordination space. To better guide your choice of the ordination method to use, the following table identify the main characteristics of the four ordination methods presented :

In the next workshop, you will see how to identify the relationships between biotic communities and sets of environmental variables describing the same sites, using canonical analyses.