Summary
TABORD, a program in FORTRAN IV for structuring phytosociological tables, is described. It is a clustering procedure based on relevé similarity combined with a procedure for obtaining a diagonal structure in the table presenting the clusters arrived at. The following steps are described:
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- Establishment of initial clusters, either by the investigator or on the basis of previous knowledge on the data, or automatically by the program.
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- Relocation, based on the RELOC-subroutine in the CLUSTAN-package of clustering programs. Various measures of (dis-) similarity are available, of which the similarity ratio is emphasized and described.
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- Homogenization of clusters through removal of deviant relevés by adopting a threshold value.
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- Fusion of clusters on the basis of the between-cluster similarity pattern by adopting a fusion limit.
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- Construction of the table. The first cluster is chosen either as one showing the lowest value of the ratio number of constant species: number of relevés, or as the one placed at the end of an axis of a cluster ordination.
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- Repetition of relocation and fusion procedure with other options.
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- Finishing touch by computer assisted visual sorting. Various additional information on cluster structure and species occurrence in clusters is presented. The capacity of the program for an IBM 370-158 system, with 512 K bytes instantly available, is roughly 300–500 relevés with 250–150 species and 30–50 initial clusters.
Three examples are discussed. An example with relevés of Spartinetea showed that the resulting TABORD table reflects the various communities and subunits as described in earlier work. An example of Arrhenatheretum relevés was used to demonstrate various numerical options in TABORD, which confirmed in a concise way what was shown inthe original treatment through many separate analyses. The third example comprises relvés of 17 Glauco-Puccinellietalia communities. Again the TABORD table very well reflects the structure and earlier ecological interpretations.
TABORD is considered a numerical elaboration of the intuitive table sorting procedure according to the Braun-Blanquet method.
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Nomenclature of salt marsh species follows Lausi, Kortekaas & Beeftink (1978); for names of Arrhenatheretum species see Oberdorfer (1970); Pflanzensoziologische Exkursionsflora für Süddeutschland, 3. Aufl., Ulmer, Stuttgart.
Contribution from the Working Group for Data-Processing in Phytosociology, International Society for Vegetation Science.
The program has been tried and discussed by students and colleagues in our Department. We thank them for their help, particularly Drs. Wil Kortekaas and Drs. Willem Schenk. The first author introduced the program and prepared a draft of the manuscript at the Department of Plant Ecology, University of Lund, during his stays there from 1975–1977 under a grant of the Swedish Natural Science Research Council (NFR-B252605). The invitation of Prof. Nils Malmer for the visits to his department and the discussions of results from TABORD with fil. kand. Stefan Persson, fil. kand. Sven Jensén and fil. mag. Carin Tyler are gratefully acknowledged. Meanwhile Persson (1977) completed a manual on TABORD in Swedish. Finally we thank Prof. László Orlóci for his comments on the manuscript.
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van der Maarel, E., Janssen, J.G.M. & Louppen, J.M.W. TABORD, a program for structuring phytosociological tables. Vegetatio 38, 143–156 (1978). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00123265
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00123265