PRIMER Demo 6.1

PRIMER 6 (Plymouth Routines In Multivariate Ecological Research) consists primarily of a wide range of univariate, graphical and multivariate routines for analysing arrays of species-by-samples data from community ecology. Data are typically of abundance, biomass, % cover, presence/ absence etc, and arise in biological monitoring of environmental impact and more fundamental studies, e.g. of dietary composition. Also catered for are matrices of physical values and chemical concentrations, which are analysed in their own right or in parallel with biological assemblage data, ‘explaining’ community structure by physico-chemical conditions. The methods of this package make few, if any, assumptions about the form of the data ('non-metric' ordination and permutation tests are fundamental to the approach) and concentrate on approaches that are straightforward to understand and explain. This robustness makes them widely applicable, leading to greater confidence in interpretation, and the transparency possibly explains why they have been adopted worldwide, particularly in marine science but increasingly in terrestrial, freshwater, paleontology etc contexts.