I have pollen data from 10 sites. I have limited the species to those of interest and have set an interval of ca 500 years between the measurements. (I will include a picture to make any of this make sense). The data is now in 20x15 excel forms. I need to compare the measurements for each species across the samples. ie. poaceae (grass) at each point in time for all the samples. I am not sure what method would be best for this. I essentially want to get a concrete way of saying how similar/dissimilar the samples are so that I can look for trends within this.
I have tried vegdist and principal component analysis, but can't make them work for multiple samples. They work fine for the separate samples, but nothing else. The cal BP is calibrated time before present and is different for each sample though I have chosen to limit them to ca.500 year intervals. I have tried to join the dataframes and matrices in different ways, but they become too big for all the roms or columns to be included(get0max).
It is entirely possible that I need to choose a different method, and am open to trying anything.
I have tried vegdist, but it only works for one dataset at a time and I need to figure out what the difference between the datasets are. I have tried any other distance method I came across. I have converted the dataframes into matrices, but that doesn't seem to help any in getting the methods to work.
