UPGMA: Euclidean and Procrustes distances

[morphmet_moderator]

----- Forwarded message from Rodrigo Lima -----

Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2012 12:21:28 -0500
From: Rodrigo Lima
Reply-To: Rodrigo Lima
Subject: UPGMA: Euclidean and Procrustes distances
To: "morphmet@morphometrics.org"

Dear morphometricians,

I would greatly appreciate your input on this matter:

The context: I am studying 9 populations of a small rodent species and I wanted to represent morphological relationships between populations using a UPGMA cluster analysis.

The problem:  I used the mean population shapes (Procrustes coordinates) to do this analysis in PAST using Euclidean distances and got a nice tree with bootstrap values, but there is no option for using Procrustes distances in this package. I get the same topology using Procrustes distances with R, but I can’t get the bootstrap values on the nodes of the tree.

The questions:

1 - Are UPGMA analyses using Euclidean distances and Procrustes distances equivalent?

2 - Is there any package in which I could simply enter the Procrustes distances and get a UPGMA tree with bootstrap values?

Thank you in advance,

Rodrigo

----- End forwarded message -----