Abstract
Studies by ourselves and others (Swan 1970, Austin & Noy-Meir 1972, Beals 1973, Hill 1973, 1974, Austin 1976a, b, Fasham 1977, Gauch Whittaker & Wentwarth 1977, Noy-Meir & Whittaker 1977, Orlóci 1978, Gauch, Whittaker & Singer 1979) have found faults with all ordination techniques currently in use, at least when applied to ecological data specifying the occurrences of species in community samples. These faults certainly do not make existing techniques useless; but they mean that results must be interpreted with caution. Even with the best techniques, the underlying structure of the data is often poorly expressed.
This research was supported by the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology, Bangor, Wales, and by a grant from the National Science Foundation to R.H. Whittaker. We thank R.H. Whittaker for encouragement and comments, S.B. Singer for assistance with the Cornell computer, and H.J.B. Birks, S.R. Sabo, T.C.E. Wells, and R.H. Whittaker for data sets used for ordination tests.
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Hill, M.O., Gauch, H.G. (1980). Detrended Correspondence Analysis: An Improved Ordination Technique. In: van der Maarel, E. (eds) Classification and Ordination. Advances in vegetation science, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9197-2_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9197-2_7
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