Comparisons of Environmental Ordinations with Principal Component Vegetational Ordinations for Sets of Data Having Different Degrees of Complexity

Data from a survey of lowland, mainly peatland, vegetation were subjected to environmental ordination based on measurements of water level and water conductivity, and to vegetational ordination derived from principal component analysis (P.C.A.). Analyzed were the total set of the data ("all types"), half sets ("nonwoody" and "woody types") and quarter sets (stands of "marshes", "meadows", "shrub fens", and "other woody types"); the number of distinct physiognomic groups in a set of data, and presumably the amount of contained heterogeneity, decreased at each segmentation.The effectiveness of the ordination models was tested by correlating measured distances in two-dimensional ordination models with 2W/(A + B) indices of vegetational similarity for randomly selected pairs of types or stands. As the physiognomic complexity decreased, the effectiveness of the P.C.A. vegetational ordination increased whereas that of the environmental ordination decreased. The environmental ordination seemed most appropriate to the data encompassing high complexity (total data set), while the P.C.A. vegetational ordination seemed most appropriate to data with low complexity (quarter sets of the data).