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vegan rda

Sibylle,

I noticed that you also sent this message to the main R-news mailing list,
but may not have received any answers. I'm not sure that I can answer to
your questions either, since I don't quite follow your explanation. So here
comes a rambling in a parallel universe in hope we go on with similar lines,
and you find some relief in this message.

1) The rda() cals should be of this form

rda(Y ~ X1 + X2 + ... Xn, data = DF, na.action = na.exclude)

where Y are the dependent data (matrix, data frame or a single variable),
and X1, X2, ..., Xn are the independent data. The independent data can be
variables or matrices (but not data frame). Argument 'data' gives the name
of the data frame (here DF) where the dependent variables are searched
first, and if they are not found there, they are searched in the main
working environment. Finally, na.action tells you how to handle missing
values in dependent data. The default was na.fail (like you were informed in
the output), but you can also have na.exclude or na.omit (see the
documentation). Can you put your problem in this form?

2) About "missing" species. If a species is missing, it is *certainly* 0.
Missing *value* (NA) means that you do not know the abundance of the
species, or you do not know the presence of the species. For presence, it
could be anything between 0 and 1. In your case it certainly is 0.

3) Missing data are not allowed in dependent variable in vegan rda().

4) You cannot reverse the left and right hand sides in the rda() formula.
The method is non-symmetric: you have dependent variable(s) (left-hand side)
and you have independent variable(s) (right-hand side). Function rda() is
very much like linear regression: you cannot swap dependent and independent
variables.

Can you go on with these guidelines?

Cheers, Jari Oksanen

First about defining an rda() model.
On 22/09/11 22:03 PM, "Sibylle St?ckli" <sibylle.stoeckli at gmx.ch> wrote: