The use of any multivariate statistical method even for a small data set requires a computer program to perform the analysis. Most of the known statistical methods are implemented in multiple statistical programs. In this book, we demonstrate how to use mainly the ordination methods with possibly the most widely employed package, Canoco. We also show how to use the methods not available in Canoco (e.g. clustering) with a general, freely available statistical software R (R Core Team, 2013) – see Appendix D for guidance on work with R.

The following paragraph describes how to obtain a trial version of the Canoco program, which you can use to work through the tutorials provided in this book, using the sample data sets (see Appendix B for information on how to download them). We also provide an overview of other available software in a tabular form and show there both freely available as well as commercial software. The attention is focused on specialised software packages, targeting ecologists (biologists), so we do not cover general statistical packages like Statistica, S-Plus, SAS, or GENSTAT.