Author
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Chellemi, Daniel |
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Submitted to: Electronic Publication
Publication Type: Proceedings Publication Acceptance Date: 7/7/2005 Publication Date: 7/14/2005 Citation: Chellemi, D.O. 2005. Multivariate statistical analysis of microbial community data. American Phytopathology Society On-line Workshop titled "Methods to detect microbes and microbial diversity in soil". Interpretive Summary: In ecology, a community refers to all biological populations living within a designated area. Together with the non-living environment they function together as an ecological system or ecosystem. Microbial communities represent a subset of the biological community. As an organizational unit, community implies some basic level of associations or interrelationships exist among its members. Discerning those relationships is an fundamental and essential step towards understanding the linkage of community structure to ecosystem function. The structure of soil microbial communities is determined through a series of complicated interactions between individual organisms and groups of organisms at various trophic and taxonomic levels, the influence environmental stimuli and anthropogenic activities. Analysis of microbial communities often produce large, multi-dimensional data sets. Defining the differences in community is hampered when statistical methods that collapse observations into a single coefficient. Multivariate analysis is branch of statistics designed to reduce the complexity of high dimensional data by creating a low-dimensional representation of the data without ignoring the relationships among individual taxa. Measurements of resemblance, cluster analysis and ordination are all methods employed to analyze multivariate data sets. Technical Abstract: In ecology, a community refers to all biological populations living within a designated area. Together with the non-living environment they function together as an ecological system or ecosystem. Microbial communities represent a subset of the biological community. As an organizational unit, community implies some basic level of associations or interrelationships exist among its members. Discerning those relationships is an fundamental and essential step towards understanding the linkage of community structure to ecosystem function. The structure of soil microbial communities is determined through a series of complicated interactions between individual organisms and groups of organisms at various trophic and taxonomic levels, the influence environmental stimuli and anthropogenic activities. Analysis of microbial communities often produce large, multi-dimensional data sets. Defining the differences in community is hampered when statistical methods that collapse observations into a single coefficient. Multivariate analysis is branch of statistics designed to reduce the complexity of high dimensional data by creating a low-dimensional representation of the data without ignoring the relationships among individual taxa. Measurements of resemblance, cluster analysis and ordination are all methods employed to analyze multivariate data sets. |
