Wednesday, June 6, 2007 - 5:00 PM
332

The use of the Pinkham-Pearson index for the comparison of community structure in BioSim2 to identify statistically-valid sectors of taxa with sites

Darlene Olsen, PhD, Mathematics, Mathematics, Norwich University, 158 Harmon Drive, Northfield, VT 05663, Carlos F. A. Pinkham, PhD, Zoology, Biology, Norwich University, 158 Harmon Drive, Northfield, VT 05663, J. Gareth Pearson, Past, EPA, Retired, 5217 Future Drive, Las Vegas, NV 89130-0151, and Brian P. Reid, PhD, Chemistry, Dartmouth Medical School, DMS Computing, 1 Rope Ferry Road, Dartmouth, NH 03755.

The Pinkham-Pearson index of similarity has been evaluated by EPA as one of the more powerful tools for comparing community structure in its rapid bioassessment protocol. However, its use has been limited because the program that ran it, BioSim1, was only available in DOS format.  A user-friendly version of BioSim2 is now available in a Java format that can run on Windows, Mac OS, Linux, or anything with Java v1.4 or higher.  Programs that generate dendrograms of taxa and/or sites are very useful for identifying patterns in complex data sets from environmental studies.  However, their major drawback is that to a great extent, they rely upon an acquired sense of where in the dendrogram to stop identifying meaningful clusters of taxa or sites, or meaningful sectors of taxa with sites.  BioSim2 has been coupled with a simple statistical program to aid in making this decision easier and more statistically rigorous.


Web Page: www2.norwich.edu/pinkhamc/