Primer software and its application in marine biodiversity studies. In: Winter School on Impact of Climate Change on Indian Marine Fisheries held at CMFRI, Cochin 18.1.2008 to 7.2.2008

The PRIMER (Plymouth Routines In Multivariate Ecological Research) software was developed by Dr. Bob Clarke and Dr. Ray Gorley of Plymouth Marine Laboratory, UK (Clarke and Warwick, 1994). This software can perform analysis of ecological data entered in spreadsheets. It can be used for calculating various univariate biodiversity measures such as Margalef’s index, Shannon-Weiner index, Brillouin’s index, Simpson diversity index etc. The latest version of the software (PRIMER 6) consists of a wide range of univariate, graphical and multivariate routines for analysing the species/samples abundance (or biomass) matrices that arise in biological monitoring of environmental impact and more fundamental studies in community ecology, together with associated physico-chemical data. The methods make few, if any, assumptions about the form of the data (‘non-metric’ ordination and permutation tests are fundamental to the approach) and concentrate on approaches that are straightforward to understand and explain