Community compositional variation in salt marshes presented by the four most dominant plant species, functional groups, and taxonomic groups respectively in GA and TX regions.

<p>Distance from shore was normalized to 22 bins for each transect, and mean plant cover was calculated within each normalized bin for each species, functional, or taxonomic group.</p

Salt marsh community dissimilarity (Bray-Curtis dissimilarity) of all pairs of sites in GA (Panel A), all pairs of sites in TX (Panel B), and all between-region pairs of sites (GA versus TX; Panel C).

<p>ANOVA results are shown for each classification approach. Salt marsh community dissimilarity was lowest in GA, intermediate in TX, and highest for the pairs of sites between GA and TX for all the classification approaches (Tukey HSD tests, <i>P</i> < 0.05).</p

Relationship between plot distance and plot dissimilarity (Bray-Curtis dissimilarity) for each of the 59 transects in GA and the 49 transects in TX, based on species (Panel A and D), functional groups (Panel B and E), and taxonomic groups (Panel C and F) respectively.

<p>In each panel, the lines represent linear regression fit to the data for each transect (detailed data for each transect are not shown). In each panel, the frequency histrogram of Mantel r values (ranges from 0 to 1) from Mantel tests for each transect is shown (significant Mantel r values evaluated by randomization tests are to the right of the dashed line).</p