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Using multiple species data for gam

Hi everyone ! 

In my humble and biased opinion, there are two approaches that may be interesting to considered to deal with so many species; the ordination approach and the model-based approach.

As Gavin proposed, using a CCA might not be a bad idea except for variance-mean problem highlighted by David Warton a few years ago in a paper in Methods in Ecology and Evolution (and can?t find it quickly at the moment). However, I worked on developing consensus RDA which might be helpful in dealing with this problem. If you want to take a look at the paper, it is here : http://dx.doi.org/10.1890/13-0648.1 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1890/13-0648.1>

Consensus RDA is currently implement in a package available on R-forge in the package ordiconsensus (https://r-forge.r-project.org/R/?group_id=68 <https://r-forge.r-project.org/R/?group_id=68>). 

Another approach that may be worth investigating for problems similar to the one discussed here was proposed by Ovaskainen and Soininen in Ecology in 2011 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1890/10-1251.1 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1890/10-1251.1>). I am currently working on implementing their work in a package called HMSC, which is also available on R-forge (https://r-forge.r-project.org/R/?group_id=1682 <https://r-forge.r-project.org/R/?group_id=1682>). Note that the HMSC package is not as mature and maybe a little buggy.

In any case, these two approaches are new ideas that might be interesting to consider in addition of the ones discussed in the current thread.

Have a good day !

Guillaume