STUDY OF ECOSYSTEMS BY FACTOR-ANALYSIS METHOD

A great number of exploratory and/or confirmatory techniques of models with latent variables may be utilized for structural study of various ecosystems. The most popular member of this family is a model of fact or analysis. We present an exploratory model which appears very suitab le especially for setting up a primary structural:hypothesis on a defi ned ecosystem. The model is based on factorization of covariance matri x by the Single Value Decomposition technique. A statistical estimatio n of communalities is performed by a reduction of factor space accordi ng to error analysis. For the primary interpretation of an ecosystem s tructure, it is sufficient to employ an abstract rotation into a,,sing le structure''. Another approach can be utilized by a target transform ation for further analyses and/or syntheses of several ecosystems, whi ch gives rise to a family of less abstract confirmatory techniques.