Research issues and future developments

We have endeavored in the preceding chapters to draw attention to the richness and flexibility of canonical analysis. The flexibility of the underlying model, in particular, is expressed in part by the number of apparently distinct methods which prove on examination to be special cases of canonical correlation analysis. Canonical variate analysis and dual scaling were both shown abstractly to be equivalent to canonical correlation analysis. The model’s flexibility is complemented by a correspondingly diverse range of application. While, in relation to the worked examples of Chaps. 6–12, it may be that the ability of canonical analysis to have parsimoniously summarized the dependence structures in question is to be attributed to the small scale of these investigations, within the class of small-scale investigations the applicability of canonical analysis was shown to be very wide. Altogether, it seems justifiable to conclude that canonical analysis offers an unusually versatile structure by means of which statistical theory, ecological theory and empirical data can be harnessed to provide insight into the organization of ecological systems.