Analyses were undertaken separately for 10- and 30-year-old
stands. Composition and abundance of woody stems in tree and
shrub layers and groundcover estimates were examined by use
of non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS). A Sorensen
(Bray-Curtis) distance was used for the ordination, as it assigns less
weight to outliers, which are common in ecological data (Sørensen,
1948). Ordinations were developed based on plotting a measure of
fit (‘‘stress’’) to the number of solutions. We calculated Kendall’s
tau rank correlation coefficients to test the strength of the association
between species and ordination axes.