I have data from a 'crime scene' with species and number of individuals from both a control patch of soil and from a shallow grave.
I am looking to see if there is a significant difference in the fauna from each soil sample (looking at invertebrates).
The obvious thing from my data is that the soil sample is very similar to the control, limiting the usefulness of my soil sample as a PMI indicator.
My supervisor wants me to produce a diversity index, so I imagine I will use a Shannon index, or Simpson.
As for data analysis, this is where I become confused; do I run tests on the diversity index results? If so how? I'm going to end up with two numbers (one from each sample). Or do I analyse the raw data? I'm not sure how I'd do that.
Normally I would be looking for a significant difference in biodiversity and number of individuals. My issue is, biodiversity could be similar for both samples, but contain totally different species. (Although in this case they don't, minus one or two extra species in my soil compared to the control.)
Hi, I would recommend you to apply PERMANOVA, then, run cluster analysis and n-MDS.
Thomas,
You should use multivariate statistics, specifically Permanova, ANOSIM or MRPP - these three tests all measure the difference between groups of samples, where each sample contains multiple variables (in your case, species).
There are several software you can use, including Mothur and R, but these require some learning. The easiest software by far would be PAST.
Good luck!
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