Analysis of Ontogenetic Spectra of Populations of Plants and Lichens via Ordinal Regression.

Ontogenetic spectra of plants and lichens tend to vary across the populations. This means that if several subsamples within a sample (or a population) were collected, then the subsamples would not be homogeneous. Consequently, the statistical analysis of the aggregated data would not be correct, which could potentially lead to false biological conclusions. In order to take into account the heterogeneity of the subsamples, we propose to use ordinal regression, which is a type of generalized linear regression. In this paper, we study the populations of cowberry Vaccinium vitis-idaea L. and epiphytic lichens Hypogymnia physodes (L.) Nyl. and Pseudevernia furfuracea (L.) Zopf. We obtain estimates for the proportions of between-sample variability in the total variability of the ontogenetic spectra of the populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]