Effects of Poor Knights Islands Marine Reserve on demersal fish populations

PLEASE NOTE, THESE DATA ARE ALSO REFERRED TO IN SUBSEQUENT PUBLICATIONS. PLEASE SEE Anderson et al. (2019) at https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.4948 FOR MORE INFORMATION.
We describe a new pathway for multivariate analysis of data consisting of counts of species abundances that includes two key components: copulas, to provide a flexible joint model of individual species, and dissimilarity-based methods, to integrate information across species and provide a holistic view of the community. Individual species are characterized using suitable (marginal) statistical distributions, with the mean, the degree of over-dispersion and/or zero-inflation being allowed to vary among a priori groups of sampling units. Associations among species are then modelled using copulas, which allow any pair of disparate types of variables to be coupled through their cumulative distribution function, while maintaining entirely the separate individual marginal distributions appropriate for each species. A Gaussian c...