ISSN:
1573-5052
Keywords:
Data transformation
;
Ordination
;
Phytoplankton
;
Principal components analysis
;
Scale
Source:
Springer Online Journal Archives 1860-2000
Topics:
Biology
Notes:
Abstract Data transformation is seen here as an aspect of scaling such that we are less interested in the quirks and properties of each transformation but are more concerned with the general scaling properties and trends of suites of transformations. Over two years of daily phytoplankton abundance data for 30 species from a temperate lake (Llyn Maelog, North Wales) were subjected to a series of scale-ordered transformations. Two major classes of transformation were systematically varied: binary and smoothing. Binary transformation scaled the cutoff threshold between ‘presence’ and ‘absence’ of a species to various levels of abundance. With successively smaller universes and smoothing windows and successive species exclusion, ordinations of sample dates revealed smaller scaled structures in the order: annual cycles of species turnover, seasonal areas of attraction and uniqueness of individual sample dates. Gradual increases in the length of the smoothing window resulted in gradual shifts in the positions of points in sample data ordination, but not necessarily in the species ordinations. Thus sample data structures are more stable with change in scale than are species data structures. These differences in stability are discussed in the context of filtering characteristics of data collection and data analysis. Transformations producing similar species statistics (means, variances and skews) did not generally give similar ordination results, while some transformations giving similar ordinations differed in species statistical parameters.
Type of Medium:
Electronic Resource
URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF00045222
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