Foundation species are structurally dominant members of ecological communities that can stabilize ecological processes and influence resilience to disturbance and resistance to invasion. Being common, they are often overlooked for conservation but are increasingly threatened from land use change, biological invasions, and over‐exploitation. The pattern of foundation species abundances over...
In this thesis we focus on a graphical model for multivariate spatially
correlated data--isomorphic chain graphs (ICG; Gitelman and Herlihy, 2007).
We feel ICG allow flexibility for modeling spatial correlation and are intuitively
appealing because each model has an associated graph that visually represents a
complex multivariate system. We examine...