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Thirty years of use of multivariate quantitative methods in benthic community ecology of marine and coastal habitats: looking to the past to planning the future

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Abstract

The benthic community ecology of marine and coastal habitats has recently been faced with the challenge of needing a predictive model to anticipate the responses of these natural communities to environmental impacts. This challenge forces the use of quantitative methods to conduct more predictive science. This work is focused on multivariate quantitative methods applied to community ecological problems. A survey was conducted in the Science Citation Index using combined keywords that reflects multivariate quantitative methods, benthic assemblages and marine and coastal habitats. There has been analytical inertia in this research field, as the most commonly used methods have not changed over the years, and novel methods that have been developed inside and outside of ecology have not been included in the analytical tools of marine benthic ecologists. Methods that are increasing the predictive power of freshwater benthic ecology, such as machine learning, have not been used for the benthic community ecology of marine and coastal habitats.

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Acknowledgments

We thank several colleagues who helped with fruitful discussions. This research is part of the Ph.D. thesis of G. C. Carvalho at the Graduate Program in Ecology and Biomonitoring, UFBA. F. Barros was supported by CNPq fellowships (Nos. 303897/2011-2 and 239978/2012-9).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Biointeração, Instituto de Ciências da Saúde, Universidade Federal da Bahia, Campus Canela, Salvador, Bahia, 40110-100, Brazil

    Gilson Correia de Carvalho

  2. Laboratório de Ecologia Bentônica, PPGEcoBio, Instituto de Biologia, Universidade Federal da Bahia, Campus Ondina, Salvador, Bahia, 40170-290, Brazil

    Gilson Correia de Carvalho & Francisco Barros

  3. Laboratório de Biodiversidade do Semiárido, Departamento de Ciências Naturais, Universidade Estadual do Sudoeste da Bahia, Itapetinga, Bahia, Brazil

    Raymundo José de Sá-Neto

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  1. Gilson Correia de Carvalho
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  3. Francisco Barros
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Correspondence to Gilson Correia de Carvalho.

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de Carvalho, G.C., de Sá-Neto, R.J. & Barros, F. Thirty years of use of multivariate quantitative methods in benthic community ecology of marine and coastal habitats: looking to the past to planning the future. Scientometrics 105, 593–610 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-015-1667-6

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