In my work, I study the habitat of certain dominated plants. I carried out a soil analysis and the associated species, but the results of the soil analysis is a very large table. How do I therefore explain the correlation between plants and soil in my analysis?
I agree with would be good to know more about what you are looking to correlate, and also a bit about the study design. Specifically the spatial scale. Is your data a bunch of plots within an area, and are looking at the composition and correlation of the individual plots, or is it more landscape level where you wish to look at how the habitat as a whole changes with the soil parameters?
I have done a bit of work using forestry plots to examine how the soil parameters change in response to the canopy, but this was rather straightforward since we could assume the original soils were very similar (and we sample nearby native forests to see what those soil properties were) and then were able to sample within the different types of forestry canopy to understand how that drove differences in the soils. However, if you are looking at a more specific spatial scale then the correlation will be much harder because there are many things that drive small variation.
I work on canal banks habitat to survey weeds and estimates soil variables that affecting distribution of these weed species
I'd try canonical correspondence analysis. Correlating species mitrces with environmental (soil) parameter matrices can also be done nicely with Primer (bio-env procedure).
Have a try with vegetation analysis software e.g MULVA-5. The individual MU LVA-5 software enable you to correlate vegetation and site factors. ENVI software might also be useful. Let me know if you need further help.
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