One Toolbox, Many Tools: A Practitioner’s Guide to Latent Variable Modelling for Community Ecology

Audun Rugstad , Bob O'Hara , Bert van der Veen, Anne Catriona Mehlhoop

In this article, we present the case for Generalized Linear Latent Variable Models (GLLVMs) as a go-to choice of statistical method for any community ecologist wanting to tackle a range of present-day ecological research questions. GLLVMs bring tools and capabilities from classic (mixed-effects) regression models to multivariate community analysis, providing a number of novel ways to tailor models specifically to one’s study questions and data properties not available when using non-model-based multivariate methods. In order to facilitate further adoption of these methods by community ecologists, we provide 1) a practitioner-focused and practical overview of the advantages the GLLVM framework brings to the table when addressing different core ecological questions, 2) a number of concrete suggestions for how GLLVMs best can be incorporated into the analytical workflow of community ecologists, and 3) two illustrative worked examples of this workflow in action on real-world data.