Summary
A set of forty stands from an alpine fell-field in the Washington Cascades was used to test these ordination methods: polar ordination, principal components analysis, reciprocal averaging, and multidimensional scalings. Because no object ‘true’ ordination can be known for such data, a series of evaluative methods were employed to characterize each method. These criteria included the rank correlation to a direct ordination based on habitat data, the degree of distortion, skewness, and disjunction revealed, the ability to separate stands, the efficiency of species ordinations, ease of interpretation, objectivity, and how well the method recovers a classification of the same data.
Based on these criteria, reciprocal averaging performs best, with principal components analysis and multidimensional scaling not much worse. Most polar ordinations produce significant disjunctions and fail to separate stands well in one or more dimensions. Both of these properties result from the selection of partially disjunct stands as end points. These conclusions apply only to data with low beta diversity.
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Nomenclature follows that of Hitchcock & Cronquist (1973)
Funds provided by the University of Washington Graduate School. Field assistance was provided by J.E. Canfield, M.J. Cushman, and A.F. Watson> L.C. Anderson provided helpful comments on the manuscript.
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Del Moral, R. On selecting indirect ordination methods. Vegetatio 42, 75–84 (1980). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00048873
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00048873