I left academia and basic ecological research decades ago and now work with environmental data collected by companies in compliance with regulatory permit requirements. I've bought and read (mostly) all the books I could find on ecological analyses using R (all but one of Alain Zuur's books, Legendre & Legendre's 2nd English edition, Mike McCarthy's Bayesian methods book, and Ben Bolker's book) but cannot find any references to 'communities' in the indices. I'd greatly appreciate pointers to sources appropriate for environmental data (which is much sloppier than ecological research data).
The last time I addressed community analyses was my post-doc research which I published in Freshwater Biology in 1984. Only within the past year have my clients needed to address issues using benthic macroinvertebrate assemblages (and fish) in streams. And, since I work by myself, I've no one with whom to share ideas and discuss approaches; perhaps there's a better forum than this mail list for this. The available benthic data has little taxonomic consistency below the family level. I want to use functional feeding groups rather than taxa as the basis of comparison because those better reflect conditions in each stream (collections of biota are made only once per year), and I want to examine correlations and cause-and-effect relations between biotic assemblages and water chemistry. There are only a few fish collections, tool, in the available data. All ideas are certainly welcome! TIA, Rich -- Richard B. Shepard, Ph.D. | Integrity - Credibility - Innovation Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc. | <http://www.appl-ecosys.com> Voice: 503-667-4517 Fax: 503-667-8863 _______________________________________________ R-sig-ecology mailing list R-sig-ecology@r-project.org https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-ecology