This book introduces ecologists to the wonderful world of modern tools for data analysis, especially multivariate analysis. For biologists with relatively little prior knowledge of statistics, it introduces a modern, advanced approach to data analysis in an intuitive and accessible way. The book begins by reviewing some core principles in statistics, and relates common methods to the linear model, a general framework for modeling data where the response is continuous. This is then extended to discrete data using generalized linear models, to designs with multiple sampling levels via mixed models, and to situations where there are multiple response variables via model-based approaches to multivariate analysis. Along the way there is an introduction to: important principles in model selection; adaptations of the model to handle non-linearity and cyclical variables; dependence due to structured correlation in time, space or phylogeny; and design-based techniques for inference that can relax some of the modelling assumptions. It concludes with a range of advanced topics in model-based multivariate analysis relevant to the modern ecologist, including fourth corner, latent variable and copula models. Examples span a variety of applications including environmental monitoring, species distribution modeling, global-scale surveys of plant traits, and small field experiments on biological controls. Math Boxes throughout the book explain some of the core ideas mathematically for readers who want to delve deeper, and R code is used throughout. Accompanying code, data, and solutions to exercises can be found in the ecostats R package on CRAN.

The application and interpretation of statistics are central to ecological study and practice. Ecologists are now asking more sophisticated questions than in the past. These new questions, together with the continued growth of computing power and the availability of new software, have created a new generation of statistical techniques. These have resulted in major recent developments in both our understanding and practice of ecological statistics. This novel book synthesizes a number of these changes, addressing key approaches and issues that tend to be overlooked in other books such as missing/censored data, correlation structure of data, heterogeneous data, and complex causal relationships. These issues characterize a large proportion of ecological data, but most ecologists' training in traditional statistics simply does not provide them with adequate preparation to handle the associated challenges. Uniquely, Ecological Statistics highlights the underlying links among many statistical approaches that attempt to tackle these issues. In particular, it gives readers an introduction to approaches to inference, likelihoods, generalized linear (mixed) models, spatially or phylogenetically-structured data, and data synthesis, with a strong emphasis on conceptual understanding and subsequent application to data analysis. Written by a team of practicing ecologists, mathematical explanations have been kept to the minimum necessary. This user-friendly textbook will be suitable for graduate students, researchers, and practitioners in the fields of ecology, evolution, environmental studies, and computational biology who are interested in updating their statistical tool kits. A companion web site provides example data sets and commented code in the R language.

This book provides a practical introduction to analyzing ecological data using real data sets. The first part gives a largely non-mathematical introduction to data exploration, univariate methods (including GAM and mixed modeling techniques), multivariate analysis, time series analysis, and spatial statistics. The second part provides 17 case studies. The case studies include topics ranging from terrestrial ecology to marine biology and can be used as a template for a reader’s own data analysis. Data from all case studies are available from www.highstat.com. Guidance on software is provided in the book.

Emphasizing the inductive nature of statistical thinking, Environmental and Ecological Statistics with R, Second Edition, connects applied statistics to the environmental and ecological fields. Using examples from published works in the ecological and environmental literature, the book explains the approach to solving a statistical problem, covering model specification, parameter estimation, and model evaluation. It includes many examples to illustrate the statistical methods and presents R code for their implementation. The emphasis is on model interpretation and assessment, and using several core examples throughout the book, the author illustrates the iterative nature of statistical inference. The book starts with a description of commonly used statistical assumptions and exploratory data analysis tools for the verification of these assumptions. It then focuses on the process of building suitable statistical models, including linear and nonlinear models, classification and regression trees, generalized linear models, and multilevel models. It also discusses the use of simulation for model checking, and provides tools for a critical assessment of the developed models. The second edition also includes a complete critique of a threshold model. Environmental and Ecological Statistics with R, Second Edition focuses on statistical modeling and data analysis for environmental and ecological problems. By guiding readers through the process of scientific problem solving and statistical model development, it eases the transition from scientific hypothesis to statistical model.

Ecological community data. Spatial pattern analysis. Species-abundance relations. Species affinity. Community classification. Community ordination. Community interpretation.

La diversidad biológica es fruto de la interacción entre numerosas especies, ya sean marinas, vegetales o animales, a la par que de los muchos factores limitantes que caracterizan el medio que habitan. El análisis multivariante utiliza las relaciones entre diferentes variables para ordenar los objetos de estudio según sus propiedades colectivas y luego clasificarlos; es decir, agrupar especies o ecosistemas en distintas clases compuestas cada una por entidades con propiedades parecidas. El fin último es relacionar la variabilidad biológica observada con las correspondientes características medioambientales. Multivariate Analysis of Ecological Data explica de manera completa y estructurada cómo analizar e interpretar los datos ecológicos observados sobre múltiples variables, tanto biológicos como medioambientales. Tras una introducción general a los datos ecológicos multivariantes y la metodología estadística, se abordan en capítulos específicos, métodos como aglomeración (clustering), regresión, biplots, escalado multidimensional, análisis de correspondencias (simple y canónico) y análisis log-ratio, con atención también a sus problemas de modelado y aspectos inferenciales. El libro plantea una serie de aplicaciones a datos reales derivados de investigaciones ecológicas, además de dos casos detallados que llevan al lector a apreciar los retos de análisis, interpretación y comunicación inherentes a los estudios a gran escala y los diseños complejos.

This book introduces the ade4 package for R which provides multivariate methods for the analysis of ecological data. It is implemented around the mathematical concept of the duality diagram, and provides a unified framework for multivariate analysis. The authors offer a detailed presentation of the theoretical framework of the duality diagram and also of its application to real-world ecological problems. These two goals may seem contradictory, as they concern two separate groups of scientists, namely statisticians and ecologists. However, statistical ecology has become a scientific discipline of its own, and the good use of multivariate data analysis methods by ecologists implies a fair knowledge of the mathematical properties of these methods. The organization of the book is based on ecological questions, but these questions correspond to particular classes of data analysis methods. The first chapters present both usual and multiway data analysis methods. Further chapters are dedicated for example to the analysis of spatial data, of phylogenetic structures, and of biodiversity patterns. One chapter deals with multivariate data analysis graphs. In each chapter, the basic mathematical definitions of the methods and the outputs of the R functions available in ade4 are detailed in two different boxes. The text of the book itself can be read independently from these boxes. Thus the book offers the opportunity to find information about the ecological situation from which a question raises alongside the mathematical properties of methods that can be applied to answer this question, as well as the details of software outputs. Each example and all the graphs in this book come with executable R code.