Dear colleagues, We would like to take advantage of Dr. Slice's comments about MANOVA to assess differences among species or biological groups. There are few multivariate normality tests available, however it is often common that Partial Warps (and therefore Relative Warps) from morphological structures do not fit normality. Thus, we think this is the main reason why Dr. Slice recommends the non-parametric alternatives for MANOVA. More specifically our problem is that we obtain different results when applying either of both parametric and non-parametric MANOVAS. We are at the moment assessing the relationships between environmental variables (remote sensing data) and morphological characters (geometric morphometrics) in a group of Neotropical bats. Neither of both types of variables fit normality very well. However, what currently puzzle us is the fact that the MANOVA performed in SPSS give us significant differences, while the np-MANOVA in PAST gives us non significant differences. The contrast in magnitude between both p-values is extreme. We havent yet looked at additional indexes of overlap, confidence or robustness for p-values. We will be grateful with any comments or suggestions. Pablo Menendez Pablo Jarrin
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