Dear list,

I am on the initial stages of trying to analyze community data, to determine the geographic scale where most variation in species composition occurs (and how much variation there is at other scales). This was originally inspired by the analysis in Underwood and Chapman (1996), where they conduct a hierarchical analysis of variance of the abundance of single species with quadrats, transects and shores arranged in a nested design (more specifically, they set: factor 1, 500 -m intervals, 3 levels; factor 2, 100-m, 3 levels, and so on).

My data is multivariate so I can't use the exact same method. I'm thinking that adonis() might work for my case, but there are two issues that have me confused:

First: what should I put on the right hand side of the formula?

Second: how I should arrange my data so that I can use something like "distance interval" as strata, since this would be a distance matrix in itself (rather than a vector)? In other words, if sample A and sample B are 10 m apart, and they are 100 m away from sample C, the pair A-B would be in one stratum, but the pairs A-C and B-C would be in another.

Perhaps I'm going down the wrong path all together?? This is all rather new for me, and I will appreciate any pointers!

(In case you are wondering why I'm not using a Mantel correlogram, it is because there are gaps of different sizes between my samples, so I would not be able to generate a continuous function of spatial dependence versus distance).

Many thanks in advance!

Genoveva Gonzalez Mirelis, Scientist
Institute of Marine Research
Nordnesgaten 50
5005 Bergen, Norway
New phone number!! +47 55906504


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