Hierarchical Ordination, A unifying framework for drivers of community processes

Abstract

Ordination methods have been used by community ecologists to describe and explore the communities they sample by reducing this variation down to a small number of dimensions. More recently, Joint Species Distribution Models have been developed to model and predict the distributions of several species simultaneously. Contemporary models for the data for both of these problems are essentially the same, called Generalised Linear Latent Variable Models (GLLVMs). Based on this we suggest some avenues of cross-fertilisation between the two areas of research. We also describe some of the extensions to GLLVMs, and from this suggest the development of Hierarchical Ordination, as a way of efficiently modelling communities of species in space.