I'm pretty new to R and would appreciate some help interpreting the output of a function that was recommended to me.
I've used the *envfit *function in the vegan package to plot vectors of four climate variables onto a species matrix ordination. The output indicates that only a single variable (mean_temp) is significant: ***VECTORS NMDS1 NMDS2 r2 Pr(>r) precip 0.41539 -0.90964 0.2948 0.112887 wind -0.61937 0.78510 0.0441 0.763237 temp_mean 0.50571 -0.86270 0.5839 0.004995 ** pressure -0.66891 0.74334 0.0688 0.622378 --- Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1 P values based on 1000 permutations. I understand that the length of the plotted arrows is proportional to the strength of the correlation between the variable and the ordination, but I'm not sure how to interpret the direction of the arrows. I know that it is "the direction of the gradient", but *I don't really understand what gradient that is referring to*. So I'm not sure how to interpret what I'm seeing in the plot, other than the significance of the relationship. Here is the plot, if that helps. Each point is a sampling period; they are numbered from week 1 - week 8. The different shapes represent two different habitats. http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/file/n4623315/species_abunance_with_environment.jpeg -- View this message in context: http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/envfit-output-vegan-package-not-sure-what-it-means-tp4623315.html Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.