Ecological Ordination Methods-Principal Component Analysis, Principal Coordinate Analysis, Redundancy Analysis and Canonical Correspondence Analysis

Abstract

Ordination analyses played a central role in community ecology. Ordination of the objects, usually species or sites in ecological studies, is simply to apply multivariate statistics to reduce the dimensions of the data so as to quantify the major ecological trends hidden in the ecological data in terms of some ecological matrices, like species-site matrix and site-environment matrix. In this chapter, I presented some most widely used ordination methods and the associated statistical backgrounds. Interested readers into the details and other ordination methods that are not listed here should refer to the classical numerical ecology book written by Prof. Legendre [1].

Keywords: Canonical correspondence analysis, computational ecology, correlation analysis, dimension reduction, ecological gradients, environmental correlates, numerical ecology, principal component analysis, species communities, species/site ordering, statistical ecology.