BIOENV

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== incomplete ==

The main idea...

The BIOENV procedure (Clarke and Ainsworth, 1993) is a dissimilarity-based and exploratory method concerned with identifying that subset of a set of explanatory variables whose Euclidean distance matrix correlates maximally with the Bray-Curtis dissimilarity matrix derived from count data (e.g. abundance data) obtained from the same sites or samples (i.e. objects). This procedure generally uses Spearman rank-based correlations and has some similarities with the Mantel test and Procrustes analysis.

Warnings

• • If the explanatory variables selected through BIOENV are used in further analysis, there is a risk of data dredging.

• Note, that several properties of (dis)similarity-based approaches have been criticised (Warton et al., 2012).

• Different implementations may have key differences that can result in incomparable results.

• This technique is intended as an exploratory approach, and should be followed with more rigourous tests of association (e.g. constrained analyses)

Walkthroughs featuring BIOENV

• Comparison of Bacterial Communities in Sands and Water at Beaches with Bacterial Water Quality Violations

Implementations

• PRIMER

  • R

    • The bioenv() function in the vegan package. Note, however, that there are key differences between this and the PRIMER implementation.

References

• Clarke KR, Ainsworth M (1993) A method of linking multivariate community structure to environmental variables. Mar Ecol Prog Ser. 92:205-219.

• Warton DI, Wright TW, Wang Y (2012) Distance-based multivariate analyses confound location and dispersion effects. Methods Ecol Evol. 3:89–101.