PRIMER-E

PRIMER 6 (Plymouth Routines In Multivariate Ecological Research) consists primarily of a wide range of univariate, graphical and multivariate routines for analysing arrays of species-by-samples data from community ecology. Data are typically of abundance, biomass, % cover, presence/ absence etc, and arise in biological monitoring of environmental impact and more fundamental studies, e.g. of dietary composition. Also catered for are matrices of physical values and chemical concentrations, which are analysed in their own right or in parallel with biological assemblage data, ‘explaining’ community structure by physico-chemical conditions. The methods of this package make few, if any, assumptions about the form of the data ('non-metric' ordination and permutation tests are fundamental to the approach) and concentrate on approaches that are straightforward to understand and explain. This robustness makes them widely applicable, leading to greater confidence in interpretation, and the transparency possibly explains why they have been adopted worldwide, particularly in marine science but increasingly in terrestrial, freshwater, paleontology etc contexts. The statistical methods underlying the software are explained in non-mathematical terms in the associated ‘methods’ manual (Clarke et al 2005), which also shows outcomes from many literature studies, e.g. of environmental effects of oil spills, drilling mud disposal and sewage pollution on soft-sediment benthic assemblages, disturbance or climatic effects on coral reef composition or fish communities, more fundamental biodiversity and community ecology patterns, mesocosm studies with multi-species outcomes etc. Many of these full data sets are included with the package so that the user can replicate the analyses given in the manual.