Please check the following link
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3460976/
Please check these links and PDF attachment also.
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11629-013-2935-7
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259869457_Species_composition_and_interspecific_association_of_plants_in_primary_succession_of_Mount_Merapi_Indonesia
Article Species composition and interspecific association of plants ...
To keep it simple: use a first pass analysis. I use this with my General Ecology students in one of their first quadrat sampling labs. It lacks statistical power: but as I like to tell the kids, discovering something while you lack stat power means you've probably discovered something real.
This depend about the objective of the study and also can be influenced about the taxons involved ...
For a highly cited comparison of different association metrics, see:
Dice, L.R. 2945. Measures of the amount of ecologic association between species. Ecology 26: 297-302.
I assume you are asking about plant vs plant interactions, and not animal vs plant or animal vs animal? And you are asking about a forest in China? And is it the forest understory plant interactions you are looking at or the tree vs shrub vs grassland components?
To study the forest plant understory interactions that would be the easiest, then if you include trees and or shrubs, that makes gathering the necessary data more difficult. Probably the easiest community to measure plant interactions would be a pure grassland community. The most difficult would be a forest or a wetlands community.
To tease out the interactions from the data, you need to gather the transect plant cover data in a different manner than usual, and start by throwing away the statistical analysis for data gathering right from the start.
If you gather your data correctly, you could write a computer program that could predict if you has a certain percentage cover of two species, what would be the ranges of a third, fourth and fifth species in the ecosystem in terms of percentage cover?
Each plant species in an ecosystem has a percentage cover constant, in relationship to every other species present, so you can work with those constants to produce mathematical formulas at the end of the day.
If you can give more details about what kind of plants you are looking at, for their interactions, I could give you a better answer.
I agree with Craig Dremann's comment above. There isn't a magic wand to analyze all interspecies interactions. It depends on the community you are studying. For plant communities, do not forget to look at the species that live in the SOIL and also the inorganic composition of the soil. Good luck
thank you for the answer,
@Arvin yes i have read that paper
@ Christopher i really agree about it. Thanks the material
@Truman yes i have read that paper and from that paper i got that we should consider with what species that we want to analyze the association A to B or B to A, the result will be different
@Craig Carlton yes, about plant-plant assosiation, i classify tree and shrubs; life stage, etc in the broadleaved korean pine forest. Before analyze species association, i want to analyze the habitat association.
@Sharon yes, biotic and abiotic factors are considered to analyze habitat association
Btw, i think term "species association" sometimes is used to be "habitat association" meaning, i have read a paper about habitat association , but the title is species association. Some paper wrote Species-Habitat Association or Species-Species Association to make it clear.
What is the most important thing to be considered when analyzed the Species-Species Asssociation? besides spatial distribution