RCA Tutorial

Introduction

• The Reference Condition Analysis plugin is used to evaluate impacts on biodiversity by computing the expected diversity based on several types of habitat metadata and compares these to the observed diversity.
• This tutorial outlines the use of the RCA plugin on a dataset from the Upper Mersey region in Nova Scotia, Canada.
• Download the RCA Tutorial files

Loading Data

• Unzip the download rca_tutorial.zip file from the link above.
• Launch GenGIS and load the following files:
  • Merseyarea.tiff using Load Raster Map
  • UpperMersey_locs.csv using Load Locations
  • UpperMersey_seqs.csv using Load Sequences

Run RCA Plugin

• Launch the RCA plugin Plugins->Reference Condition Analysis.
• Leave the default (and only) choice for RCA Model to atlantic_rca_model.
• Check that the Taxon Names box has Label selected (this contains the names of the taxa that were loaded with the sequence file).
• Check that the Taxon Counts box has Count selected (this contains the number of each taxa that were loaded with the sequence file).
• Click Run. Results should appear in table within a couple of seconds.

Visualizing Results

• Each