%0 Research Notes
%T The effect of pseudospecies cut level settings on the results of TWINSPAN classification
%A Hotanen, Juha-Pekka
%D 1990
%J Suo - Mires and peat
%V 41
%N 2
%U http://suo.fi/article/9673
%X TWINSPAN classifications of the same drained mire vegetation data using four different pseudospecies cut level scales were compared. The material consisted of 96 sample plots located on drained spruce and pine mires in eastern Finland. The pseudospecies cut level scales were the octave scale (0, 0.5, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 and 64%), a coarse scale (0, 5, 10, 20 and 50%), TWINSPAN default settings (0, 2, 5, 10 and 20%), and presence/absence. The classificatons were quite similar at the first division but they differed markedly from each other at the final third division showing that the choice of cut levels has an important effect on TWIN-SPAN results. The sample plots in one TWINSPAN cluster defined with set of cut levels were allocated to several clusters defined with other cut level settings. The presence/absence setting resulted in a classification which was the most different from the classification made using the default settings. The TWINSPAN classifications performed using the default and octave scale settings corresponded the best with the field classification of the plots and were ecologically the most interpretable.

Keywords: Drained peatlands, mire classification, mire site type, multivariate analysis, vegetation