...from the Microcomputer Power website.

by R.H.G. Jongman, Cajo J.F. ter Braak, and O.F.R. van Tongeren

Computer techniques are being used increasingly by ecologists to analyze field data on plant and animal communities and their environment.

This book provides a new synthesis of methods that have proven to be most useful for such analyses. There are chapters on data collection, regression analysis, calibration, ordination, cluster analysis and spatial analysis.

Examples and exercises (with solutions) complete most chapters. Three case studies are also included. Only simple mathematics is used, making the methods accessible to most ecologists and geographers. In the selection of methods, due attention is paid to the special properties of ecological data:

* numerous species recorded as present/absent or on a semi-quantitative abundance scale

* the non-linear relationships between species and environmental variables that often exist

* the high inter-correlations among species and among environmental variables.

In addition to the more traditional ordination and cluster techniques, this is the first textbook to explain to ecologists in an elementary way such powerful data-analysis techniques as logit regression (a regression technique appropriate for analyzing presence-absence data), canonical correspondence analysis (a canonical ordination technique especially designed to relate species communities to environmental variables) and kriging (a sophisticated spatial-interpolation technique).

Readership The book is primarily directed to post graduate students in ecology, geography, and environmental sciences, and to professional ecologists, who want to better understand the methods they are already using and are eager to learn new, more powerful methods.

Contents:
1. Introduction
2. Data Collection
3. Regression
4. Calibration
5. Ordination
6. Cluster Analysis
7. Spatial aspects of ecological data
8. Numerical methods in practice
- case studies
9. Literature
10. Index

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