Customer Reviews

Numerical Ecology, Volume 24, Second Edition (Developments in Environmental Modelling)

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This is THE TEXT to have if you use any of the numerical techniques in the field of quantitative ecology. Its scope if exhaustively comprehensive. The authors clearly explain which methods are at your disposal under given circumstances and which are inappropriate to use. Many of the methods described are illustrated with case studies of ecological examples from the literature. In most cases, the authors walk you thru the computational steps involved in using a particular numerical method--this would make it possible for the reader to construct a "home grown" algorithm for methods unavailable in "off-the-shelf" statistical packages. In addition, the book is also thankfully littered with citations and references for those computer programs that are available for each of the methods described...this is very up-to-date material, as many of these references are web sites!

A great resource for graduate level and above. This book is comprehensive in terms of numerical ecology and is for the more advanced quantitative ecologist. My area of interest is site similarity indices, and I have only begun to tap into the knowledge available in this book on the subject. I am sure I will be returning to it repeatedly through the years.

This is the best book on numerical ecology available. Legendre & Legendre are already a classical on communities data analysis, and this second edition is a fundamental update. The book should be always around when you are analysing complex data sets and want a correct method and a valid interpretation. This is not the usual book of biostatistics, and a good background knowledge on basic univariate statistics is essential. It has also a good introduction on the calculations involved in multivariate analysis, that must be read in order to follow the rest of the book. It covers in detail many multivariate methods a discuss also its applications and drawbacks. If you look for an instrumental "cookbook" style, look somewhere else, but if you want to really understand basic multivariate analysis, this is your book.