Statistical methods e macrofungi on CWD One question of interest is whether ‘species richness’, taken to
mean the number of macrofungal species, was a function of CWD attributes, i.e. decay class, length, diameter, bryophyte
cover aswell as the derived attributes volume and surface area. To answer this question, multiple linear regression analysis, with forward and backward elimination procedures, was used on 814 composite pieces ofCWD, derived frompiecing together 965 individual pieces of CWD that included pieces measured separately on each side of the boundary when CWD extended over the boundary between subplots. A second question of interest is whether the macrofungal
species assemblages on CWD were correlated with the stand composition of the subplots in which they were found. The
identification of the living trees showed that 88 of the 100 subplots could be classified into one of three main stand types,
‘Pomaderris’, ‘Monotoca’ or ‘Rainforest’, described in the previous section. Subplots not assigned to one of these three
stand types were placed in a fourth group, labelled ‘Unclassified’. As this study is of an exploratory character, without
replication of forest types, an unconstrained ordination was used to display the positions of the pieces of CWD. As before,
nMDS was used, and implemented in PRIMER v6 (Clarke & Gorley 2006). This was followed by ANOVA-like analyses to
explore the link between the scores on the ordination axes and the stand type of the subplot in which the piece of CWD was found. To examine any association between the positions on the ordination diagram of the individual pieces of CWD and their decay classes and diameters, correlation analyses were carried out between the ordination axes scores and these variables. To improve computational efficiency, and avoid the possibility of spurious results due to inadequate number of records, species occurring oncewere ignored, and only pieces of CWDthat had five ormoremacrofungal recordswere used. This confined the exercise to 110 macrofungal species on 209 pieces of CWD.