Multivariate Analysis of Ecological Data

2 Foreword This textbook provides study materials for the participants of the course named Multivariate Analysis of Ecological Data that we teach at our university for the third year. Material provided here should serve both for the introductory and the advanced versions of the course. We admit that some parts of the text would profit from further polishing, they are quite rough but we hope in further improvement of this text. We hope that this book provides an easy-to-read supplement for the more exact and detailed publications like the collection of the Dr. Ter Braak' papers and the Canoco for Windows 4.0 manual. In addition to the scope of these publications, this textbook adds information on the classification methods of the multivariate data analysis and introduces some of the modern regression methods most useful in the ecological research. Wherever we refer to some commercial software products, these are covered by trademarks or registered marks of their respective producers. This publication is far from being final and this is seen on its quality: some issues appear repeatedly through the book, but we hope this provides, at least, an opportunity to the reader to see the same topic expressed in different words.