Pluralism and diversity: trends in the use and application of ordination methods 1990-2007

Question What are the trends and patterns in the application of ordination techniques in vegetation science since 1990? Location Worldwide literature analysis. Methods Evaluation of five major journals of vegetation science; search of all ISI-listed ecological journals. Data were analysed with ANCOVAs, Spearman rank correlations, GLMs, biodiversity indices and simple graphs. Results The ISI search retrieved fewer papers that used ordinations than the manual evaluation of five selected journals. Both retrieval methods revealed a clear trend in increasing frequency of ordination applications from 1990 to the present. Canonical Correspondence Analysis was far more frequently detected by the ISI search than any other method. Applications such as Correspondence Analysis/Reciprocal Averaging and Detrended Correspondence Analysis have increasingly been used in studies published in "applied" journals, while Canonical Correspondence Analysis, Redundancy Analysis and Non-Metric Multidimensional Scaling were more frequently used in journals focusing on more "basic" research. Overall, Detrended Correspondence Analysis was the most commonly applied method within the five major journals, although the number of publications slightly decreased over time. Use of Non-Metric Multidimensional Scaling has increased over the last 10 years. Conclusion The availability of suitable software packages has facilitated the application of certain techniques such as Non-Metric Multidimensional Scaling. However, choices of ordination techniques are currently less driven by the constraints imposed by the software; there is also limited evidence that the choice of methods follows social considerations such as the need to use fashionable methods. Methodological diversity has been maintained or has even increased over time and reflects the researcher's need for diverse analytical tools suitable to address a wide range of questions.