As soil is the basis of all terrestrial ecosystems, degraded soil means lower fertility, reduced biodiversity and reduced human welfare. Therefore the focus of this paper is on elucidating the influence of land use and land cover (LULC) change on two important soil quality indicators that are fundamental to effective measures for ameliorating soil degradation; namely soil acidity and soil salin...

Metric (eigenanalysis) and nonmetric multidimensional scaling strategies for ecological ordination were compared. The results, based on simulated coenoplane data showing varying degrees of species turnover on two independent environmental axes, suggested some strong differences between metric and nonmetric scaling methods in their ability to recover underlying nonlinear data structures. Prior d...

A new multivariate analysis technique, developed to relate community composition to known variation in the environment, is described. The technique is an extension of correspondence analysis (reciprocal averaging), a popular ordination technique that extracts continuous axes of vari? ation from species occurrence or abundance data. Such ordination axes are typically interpreted with the help of...

Multi-scale ordination (MSO) deals with potential scale-dependence in species assemblages, by studying how results from multivariate ordination may be different on different spatial scales. MSO methods were initially based on two-term local covariances between species, and therefore required sampling designs composed of adjacent quadrats. A variogram-based MSO, applicable to very diverse sampli...

A multivariate statistical analysis was performed on morphological characters of sixty-one populations of Avena eriantha Dur. A. clauda Dur., A. barbata Pott ex Link., A. wiestii Steud., A. fatua L., A. sterilis ssp. ludoviciana L. and A. sativa L. Factor analysis revealed that intraspecific morphological variations are due to quantitative characters. Interspecific as well as intersectional rel...

Canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) is perhaps the most popular multivariate technique used by environmental ecologists for constrained ordination; it is an approximation to the maximum likelihood solution of the Gaussian response model. In this article, we look at the constrained ordination problem from a slightly different point of view and argue that it is this particular point of view t...