Traditional multivariate techniques: Potential for use in ecotoxicology

This paper summarizes established multivariate techniques and illustrates e xamples of their use with ecotoxicological data. Multivariate analysis can be broken down into three main areas of application: ordination, clustering /discrimination, and investigating relationships between sets of variables. Many of these techniques are well established, having been developed in th e first half of this century. Although some multivariate techniques predate the very familiar analysis of variance (ANOVA), the popularity of multivar iate analysis in ecotoxicology is currently overshadowed by ANOVA and regre ssion techniques. We suggest that this will become increasingly less the ca se and that we can expect to see much greater use of multivariate technique s in ecotoxicology in the future.