Simultaneous analysis of a sequence of paired ecological tables: A comparison of several methods

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new method for analyzing sequences of paired ecological tables to assess changes in species-environment relationships over time, comparing it with existing methods using R's ade4 package.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel analysis method for sequential paired ecological tables and compares it with two existing methods in the context of ecological data analysis.

Findings

The new method effectively detects changes in species-environment relationships.

Comparison shows the new method performs better in certain ecological scenarios.

All methods are implemented in the R ade4 package for practical use.

Abstract

A pair of ecological tables is made of one table containing environmental variables (in columns) and another table containing species data (in columns). The rows of these two tables are identical and correspond to the sites where environmental variables and species data have been measured. Such data are used to analyze the relationships between species and their environment. If sampling is repeated over time for both tables, one obtains a sequence of pairs of ecological tables. Analyzing this type of data is a way to assess changes in species-environment relationships, which can be important for conservation Ecology or for global change studies. We present a new data analysis method adapted to the study of this type of data, and we compare it with two other methods on the same data set. All three methods are implemented in the ade4 package for the R environment.