Hello Ecolog-ers, I'm analysing my Braun-Blanquet cover data for a group of vegetation structure variables (in diff habitat types) and am having trouble finding a definitive way to do this legitimately with mixed effects models, ANOVAs and ordinations.
The issue is that the BB scale is an ordinal scale. Many studies have simply taken midpoint values of the scale classes and turned the ordinal data into a metric and analysed from there. To me this seems a bit dodgy, given that there are really only 9 values that these variables can take, rather than the 100 values that is implicit in the metric percentage of cover. I have read Podani's many papers on the issues and potential solutions for ordinations but I seem to be finding it more difficult to find literature with mixed effects models, or any kind of regression-based model. Has anyone else encountered these problems? Can anyone suggest some current literature on the matter? Thank you kindly, Liz -- Liz Pryde PhD Candidate (off-campus) School of Earth and Environmental Sciences James Cook University Thornbury, Melbourne
