Canoco Reference Manual and User’s Guide: Software for Ordination (version 5.0)

Canoco is a software package for multivariate data analysis, with an emphasis on dimesional reduction (ordination), regression analysis, and the combination of the two, constrained ordination. Canoco makes effective and powerful ordination methods easilyt accessible for scientists wanting to infer and visualize pattern and structure in complex multivariate data, e.g. biologists researching the relations between plant and animal communities and their environment. Canoco contains linear and unimodal ordination methods, with the possibility to account for background variation specified by covariates. In combination with extensive facilities for permutation tests, these methods have proven to be remarkably effective in solving applied research problems.