Grouping sites on the basis of their biological information is a common goal in ecology that has scientific and management applications.Two applications are studied in this work: classifying vegetation types for management units and predicting these units into unsampled space, and finding assemblages of fish and investigating how the presence of these assemblages varies with covariates. Data that are used to find the groupings often have extraneous sources of variation, such as those related to sampling, which are often ignored but should be accounted for when finding the groupings. In ecological studies, this is increasingly common as data sets are now being combined from many smaller survey efforts. We show, through a model-based clustering method, how the groupings can be obtained, while accounting for sampling artefacts.

Item Type:	Refereed Article
Keywords:	Bioregions, statistical method, sub-Antarctic, biogeography, clustering, community, mixture model, region of common profile, sampling artefact
Research Division:	Biological Sciences
Research Group:	Ecology
Research Field:	Marine and Estuarine Ecology (incl. Marine Ichthyology)
Objective Division:	Environment
Objective Group:	Flora, Fauna and Biodiversity
Objective Field:	Marine Flora, Fauna and Biodiversity
Author:	Hill, NA (Dr Nicole Hill)
ID Code:	114639
Year Published:	2017
Web of Science® Times Cited:	1
Deposited By:	Ecology and Biodiversity
Deposited On:	2017-02-22
Last Modified:	2018-04-18
Downloads:	0