Customer Reviews

Vegetation Description and Analysis: A Practical Approach

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This book covers everything that a budding phyosociologist could want to know about setting up surveys, collecting data and analysing the results. Despite its modest title it is strong on multivariate analyses - anyone thinking of applying ordination or akin techniques to plant data should read this book! It also comes with a disc including some free software, which appeared to work perfectly well. I am not sure that this was a great selling point for me since I have all these features + more in other, commercial stats packages. The package would certainly be adequate to get a student started though - good value!

Still the best intro text for undergrad and postgrad ecology students needing to understand patterns of plant (or any other) distribution or relate these to environmental or ecological variables using classification or ordination techniques. Clear and as simple descriptions of the techniques and how to interpret results as it's possible to be with this field, plus fantastic contextual info on what the strengths and weaknesses of various methods and what is appropriate where. Got me through my PhD a decade ago and was just as helpful for a MSc student working on plant/pollinator networks this year. A little out of date now and slightly weak on the new kid on the block - Multidimensional Scaling - but still the best place to start.