vegandevs / vegan

R package for community ecologists: popular ordination methods, ecological null models & diversity analysis
https://vegandevs.github.io/vegan/
GNU General Public License v2.0
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Absolute counts or relative abundance for BC distance matrix #672

Closed MonicaSteffi closed 4 months ago

MonicaSteffi commented 4 months ago

Dear everyone,

I have a dataset of absolute counts and relative abundance obtained from qPCR experiments. I'm interested in calculating the Bray-Curtis dissimilarity to analyze the community structure across different samples.

I plan to use the vegdist function from the vegan package in R.

My main question is:

Can I use relative abundance data directly with vegdist, or do I take the absolute counts abundances to calculate Bray-Curtis dissimilarity?

I'm particularly interested in understanding if there are any pitfalls or considerations I should be aware of when using relative abundance data for this type of analysis. Any insights or recommendations would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance!