Which statistical test will help me compare and state significance of the three zones? Is there any indices by which I can calculate the association/proximity of two species?
What are you interested to compare? The species number and the species composition among the zones? If it's the case a good start would be read:
Marti J. Anderson 2001. A new method for non‐parametric multivariate analysis of variance and
Chao et al 2014. Rarefaction and extrapolation with Hill numbers: a framework for sampling and estimation in species diversity studies
The Bray Curtis Index is useful for comparison of the ecological 'distance' between samples.
@Moreno I am more interested to analyze and compare the species composition among the zones.
Thank Moreno and Dave, Your answers were very much helpful...
You can use the Anderson (2001) methods to analyze the Bray Curtis Index (BCI) data to determine whether the sites are statistically different, or you can use non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) to undertake a multivariate analysis of the BCI data, or you can analyze the BCI data by hand and compile BCI scores for individual species to see where the differences lie... which is what I like to do when first looking at BCI data because it provides an in depth understanding of the data. Or, you can undertake a hierarchical analysis to determine the connectivity of the sites. Whatever you choose, you should consider analyzing the raw data, the relativized data, the presence/absence data (Sorenson's Index), and/or the transformed data (log or some such)... each of these will provide different results, which can be interesting.
The species diversity in natural forest has been categorized in to three zones viz., Upper ,middle and lower zone respectively. Based on the species richness the diversity could be distributed accordingly. eg In upper zone (Sola region) is being distributed very less number of species as compared with mid and lower zone. In this plausible changes of the diversity the Shannon diversity index (SDI) is best suited statistical method to know the significance level between the three zones in selected areas of study design.Reference
Thank you Dave Huebert and H.olavanahalli Narasimha Murthy sir.. Its helpful..
- Badges
- Science topic