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CO‐CORRESPONDENCE ANALYSIS: A NEW ORDINATION METHOD TO RELATE TWO COMMUNITY COMPOSITIONS
Author(s) -
ter Braak Cajo J. F.,
Schaffers André P.
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
ecology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.144
H-Index - 294
eISSN - 1939-9170
pISSN - 0012-9658
DOI - 10.1890/03-0021
Subject(s) - ordination , canonical correspondence analysis , correspondence analysis , gradient analysis , canonical correlation , plant community , detrended correspondence analysis , community structure , partial least squares regression , biomass (ecology) , ecology , vegetation (pathology) , covariance , mathematics , canonical analysis , multiple correspondence analysis , statistics , biology , ecological succession , habitat , medicine , pathology
A new ordination method, called co‐correspondence analysis, is developed to relate two types of communities (e.g., a plant community and an animal community) sampled at a common set of sites in a direct way. The method improves the simple, indirect approach of applying correspondence analysis (reciprocal averaging) to the separate species data sets and correlating the resulting ordination axes. Co‐correspondence analysis maximizes the weighted covariance between weighted averaged species scores of one community and weighted averaged species scores of the other community. It thus attempts to identify the patterns that are common to both communities. Both a symmetric descriptive and an asymmetric predictive form are developed. The symmetric form relates to co‐inertia analysis and the asymmetric, predictive form to partial least‐squares regression. In two examples the predictive power of co‐correspondence analysis is compared with that of canonical correspondence analyses on syntaxonomic and environmental data. In the first example, carabid beetles in roadside verges are shown to be more closely related to plant species composition than to vegetation structure (biomass, height, roughness, among others), and, in the second example, bryophytes in spring meadows are shown to be more closely related to the species composition of the vascular plants than to the measured water chemistry.