MDA: a MATLAB-based program for morphospace-disparity analysis

A MATLAB((R)) program that examines patterns of state-space occupation is described. Four subroutines are available with which to visualize morphospace patterns: (i) in terms of their features such as dispersion, aggregation and location, thereby allowing users to extract complementary quantitative information about how the state-space is structured, and (ii) in terms of changes in those patterns that can be compared with other biotic (e.g., extinction, origination rates) or abiotic (e.g., environmental proxy) information. The program incorporates many of the latest and most widely used statistical parameters for describing multivariate spaces. The parameters are estimated on the basis of bootstrap resampling or bootstrap rarefaction procedures. Applications based on stochastic simulation of the evolution of monophyletic clade (using m-file contained in the help folder of the MDA program) are presented so as to illustrate the program's various options. The versatility of MDA allows the most interesting patterns to be extracted rapidly from data and the program to be applied readily to a wide range of state-space problems. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.