Abstract:
BioDiversity Pro was designed and developed by Neil McAleece. This package was devised jointly by P.J.D. Lambshead and G.L.J. Paterson of the The Natural History Museum in London and J.D. Gage of the Scottish Association for Marine Science, Oban, Scotland.The program will calculate automatically, using only the selected samples and the current program options. When the calculation is finished, a
... graph and results spreadsheet will pop-up (according to the user options) showing the results of the calculation.
There are four types of calculation to be performed, as noted below:
1) Alpha : Defined by Whittaker as local diversity, used here for calculations based on single samples, also
known as univariate diversity measures.
a) Abundance Plot: K-Dominance > Rank
b) Abundance Model: Log-Series > Broken Stick c) Rarefaction d) Diversity
Indices: Shannon > Alpha > Caswell > Berger-Parker > Simpson > Hill > Margalef > McIntosh
2) Beta : SHE Analysis > Species Richness > Species Distribution
3) Multivariate: Simultaneous analysis of more than one independent variable. Used here for ordination and clustering techniques. These are powerful descriptive methods which can suggest correlations between biodiversity patterns and potential causes but cannot resolve cause and effect. In particular, the user is warned that is uncomfortably easy to fall into circular reasoning (groups defined by the method are justified as 'real' because the method has defined them). Where a signal in the data is strong then all the methods will tend to give similar results. Where the signal is weak, or a multiplicity of signals confuses the issue, different methods may give alternative results. It is therefore worth trying more than one technique or optimisation. Principal Components > Correspondence Analysis > Cluster Analysis > Non-Metric MDS
4) Comparisons: Simple comparisons of the data
including statistical tests. Descriptive Statistics > Kulczynski >
Mann-Whitney > Rank Correlation > Correlation > Variance-Covariance > ANOSIM.
(Source : BioDiversity Pro, 1997 NHM & SAMS)