| Systematic sampling of communities gives rise to large contingency tables summing up possible changes in the assemblages' structure. Such tables are generally analysed by multivariate statistical methods, which are ill-suited for simultaneously analysing rare and common species (Field et al., 1982). In order to separately process species belonging to either of these categories, we propose a statistical method to select common species in a sequence of ecological surveys. It is based on a precise definition of rarity, and depends on a rarity parameter. In this work, this parameter will be optimised so that the sub-table of common species captures the essential features of the complete table as well as possible. In this way we analysed the spatio-temporal... |
