What a wreck

I suppose I should tell you what I'm working on now. Since I got back from Svalbard, my focus has been mainly on my shipwreck project, and if you don't remember what I'm talking about, refresh your memory here.

Zoanthids, anemones, a crab, a sea star, and a fish  living  on
the rusty hull of a sunken battleship.

I've been working on the shipwreck data set for quite some time now, trying to understand what factors structure the invertebrate communities that live on them. I've looked at the size of each wreck; I've considered how they're oriented on the seafloor. I've looked up which type of ship made each wreck and what materials were used to construct them. I've considered elevation off the seafloor, complexity of the shipwreck surface, the extent of fishing gear entangled in each.

And I'm finally making progress.

When I met with Andrew in Stavanger a few weeks ago, he suggested I try a statistical technique that we used in the Svalbard image analysis paper. It's called a redundancy analysis, and it's designed to show which abiotic factors have the strongest influence on the biological communities. I can't give you the details of my results here, but I can tell you I'm very excited about them. There are clear and distinct patterns in the shipwreck communities, and there are 5 abiotic factors strongly influencing the patterns.

Step by step, my analysis is moving forward!