Evaluating the effectiveness of the Mantel test and Procrustes randomization test for exploratory ecological similarity among paleocommunities

The Mantel test and Procrustes Randomization test (PROTEST) are critically valuable to paleoecological research in allowing statistical evaluation of observed trends in multivariate data. Paleoecological data are inherently multivariate, and feature caveats (varied sample size, hierarchical sampling, multiple independent variables) that make them ill-suited for univariate statistics. Established modern ecological cases demonstrate that the...