On the challenge of treating various types of variables: application for improving the measurement of functional diversity

Oikos - Tập 118 Số 3 - Trang 391-402 - 2009
Sandrine Pavoine1, Jeanne Vallet2, Anne‐Béatrice Dufour3, Sophie Gachet4, Hervé Daniel2,5
1CERSP - Conservation des espèces, Restauration et Suivi des Populations (55 rue Buffon - 75005 PARIS - France)
2AGROCAMPUS OUEST (Institut Supérieur des Sciences Agronomiques, Agroalimentaires, Horticoles et du Paysage - 65, rue de St Brieuc - CS 84215 - 35042 Rennes cedex - France)
3LBBE - Laboratoire de Biométrie et Biologie Evolutive - UMR 5558 (43 Bld du 11 Novembre 1918 69622 VILLEURBANNE CEDEX - France)
4MNHN - Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle (57, rue Cuvier - 75231 Paris Cedex 05 - France)
5PAYSAGE - Unité Paysage et Ecologie (UP PAYSAGE et ECOLOGIE, 2 rue le Nôtre F-49045 Angers - France)

Tóm tắt

Functional diversity is at the heart of current research in the field of conservation biology. Most of the indices that measure diversity depend on variables that have various statistical types (e.g. circular, fuzzy, ordinal) and that go through a matrix of distances among species. We show how to compute such distances from a generalization of Gower's distance, which is dedicated to the treatment of mixed data. We prove Gower's distance can be extended to include new types of data. The impact of this generalization is illustrated on a real data set containing 80 plant species and 13 various traits. Gower's distance allows an efficient treatment of missing data and the inclusion of variable weights. An evaluation of the real contribution of each variable to the mixed distance is proposed. We conclude that such a generalized index will be crucial for analyzing functional diversity at small and large scales.

Từ khóa


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Oikos

Tập 118 Số 3

391-402

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