This seems like a classic ordination problem. I'd recommend looking into Canonical Correspondence Analysis (CCA). If you're unfamiliar with it, essentially it tries to explain where species occur along specified environmental gradients.

There are plenty of other flavors of ordination that might also be helpful, at least in terms of visualizing how your species are clustered into distinctive communities and overlaying those communities on your abiotic gradients. I'd recommend ordination rather than bivariate analysis between species and environmental variables, because you're likely to have correlated variables and clusters of particular species into certain familiar assemblages. Ordination will let you leverage these correlations and species clustering and answer questions like "what combination of environmental variables best explains high sedge abundance?"

You might also look into something called indicator species analysis. This method essentially measures the affinity of different species for different groups of sites. It might be worthwhile if you can separate your sites into discrete groups.

If you haven't used ordination, this overview might be helpful: http://ordination.okstate.edu/overview.htm

I also recommend the very useful McCune and Grace 2002, Analysis of Ecological Communities. https://www.pcord.com/book.htm It covers essentially the whole gamut of ordination, including indicator species analysis.

Good luck!

Thanks for your interesting question related to potential indicator species. You can check Significant correlations between macrophytes and environmental parameters. May be you can consult the attached literatures

. Article Investigation of mangrove macroalgae as bioindicators of est...

This seems like a classic ordination problem. I'd recommend looking into Canonical Correspondence Analysis (CCA). If you're unfamiliar with it, essentially it tries to explain where species occur along specified environmental gradients.

There are plenty of other flavors of ordination that might also be helpful, at least in terms of visualizing how your species are clustered into distinctive communities and overlaying those communities on your abiotic gradients. I'd recommend ordination rather than bivariate analysis between species and environmental variables, because you're likely to have correlated variables and clusters of particular species into certain familiar assemblages. Ordination will let you leverage these correlations and species clustering and answer questions like "what combination of environmental variables best explains high sedge abundance?"

You might also look into something called indicator species analysis. This method essentially measures the affinity of different species for different groups of sites. It might be worthwhile if you can separate your sites into discrete groups.

If you haven't used ordination, this overview might be helpful: http://ordination.okstate.edu/overview.htm

I also recommend the very useful McCune and Grace 2002, Analysis of Ecological Communities. https://www.pcord.com/book.htm It covers essentially the whole gamut of ordination, including indicator species analysis.

Good luck!

Yes, I agree with Samuel, I was going to recommend CCA too :)

You can use the relative position of taxa (i.e. pRDA species scores, which indicate the centre of their distribution along the axes of the pRDA ordination space) to rank species according to their sensitivity/tolerance to each of the environmental gradients. With Hill’s scaling the species optima (species score) are scaled as standard deviations of species turnover units and are proportional to β-diversity along each pressure gradient. The are other methods as well to identify indicator species:

Ind Val

Threshold Indicator Analysis (TITAN)

Random Forest

good luck

Richard

Hello Aravinda,

It seems in your investigation that the relationship between the macrophytes and physico-chemical parameters, statistically, be established with the help of regression analysis.