Estimating Taxon-Environment Relationships: Central Tendencies
Central Tendencies
Taxon-environment relationships can be expressed in terms of central tendencies that describe the average environmental conditions under which a taxon is likely to occur. Using this method, the single-value descriptor of the taxon-environment relationship, uwa, for taxon j is estimated by computing the mean of the environmental variable of interest at the sites in which the taxon is observed:
Once central tendencies are computed for each taxon, one can use them to infer conditions at a new site based only on biological observations, by computing a weighted average inference.