vegan (version 1.0-1)

vegdist: Good Dissimilarity Measures for Ecological Gradients

Description

The function computes community dissimilarity indices which are known to have a good rank-order relation with gradient separation and are thus efficient in community ordination with multidimensional scaling.

Usage

vegdist(x, method="bray", diag=FALSE, upper=FALSE)

Arguments

x
Community data matrix
method
Dissimilarity index
diag
Compute diagonals.
upper
Return only the upper diagonal.

Value

  • Should be interchangeable with dist and return a distance object of the same type.

Details

The function knows the following dissimilarity indices: ll{ euclidean $d_{jk} = \sqrt{\sum_i (x_{ij}-x_{ik})^2}$ manhattan $d_{jk} = \sum_i |x_{ij} - x{ik}|$ gower $d_{jk} = \sum_i \frac{|x_{ij}-x_{ik}|}{\max_i-\min_i}$ canberra $d_{jk}=\frac{1}{N-Z} \sum_i \frac{|x_{ij}-x{ik}|}{x_{ij}+x_{ik}}$ bray $\frac{\sum_i |x_{ij}-x{ik}|}{\sum_i (x_{ij}+x_{ik})}$ kulczynski $d_{jk} = 1-0.5(\frac{\sum_i \min(x_{ij},x_{ik})}{\sum_i x_{ij}} + \frac{\sum_i \min(x_{ij},x_{ik})}{\sum_i x_{ik}} )$ } where $N-Z$ is the number of non-zero entries.

Infamous ``double zeros'' are removed in Canberra dissimilarity.

Euclidean and Manhattan dissimilarities are not good in gradient separation without proper standardization but are still included for comparison and special needs.

Some of indices become identical or rank-order similar after some standardizations.

References

Faith, D.P, Minchin, P.R. and Belbin, L. (1987) Compositional dissimilarity as a robust measure of ecological distance. Vegetatio 69, 57-68.

See Also

decostand, dist, rankindex, isoMDS

Examples

Run this code
data(varespec)
vare.dist <- vegdist(varespec)

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