van der Ham Joris L
Department of Environmental Science and Policy, George Mason University, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax Virginia, 22030.
J Med Entomol. 2016 Sep 1;53(5):1238-1241. doi: 10.1093/jme/tjw069.
Forensic entomologists can use carrion communities' ecological succession data to estimate the postmortem interval (PMI). Permutation tests of hierarchical cluster analyses of these data provide a conceptual method to estimate part of the PMI, the post-colonization interval (post-CI). This multivariate approach produces a baseline of statistically distinct clusters that reflect changes in the carrion community composition during the decomposition process. Carrion community samples of unknown post-CIs are compared with these baseline clusters to estimate the post-CI. In this short communication, I use data from previously published studies to demonstrate the conceptual feasibility of this multivariate approach. Analyses of these data produce series of significantly distinct clusters, which represent carrion communities during 1- to 20-day periods of the decomposition process. For 33 carrion community samples, collected over an 11-day period, this approach correctly estimated the post-CI within an average range of 3.1 days.
法医昆虫学家可以利用腐肉群落的生态演替数据来估计死后间隔时间（PMI）。对这些数据进行层次聚类分析的排列检验提供了一种概念性方法来估计PMI的一部分，即定殖后间隔时间（post-CI）。这种多变量方法产生了一个统计上不同的聚类基线，反映了分解过程中腐肉群落组成的变化。将post-CI未知的腐肉群落样本与这些基线聚类进行比较，以估计post-CI。在这篇简短的通讯中，我使用先前发表研究的数据来证明这种多变量方法的概念可行性。对这些数据的分析产生了一系列显著不同的聚类，它们代表了分解过程中1至20天期间的腐肉群落。对于在11天内收集的33个腐肉群落样本，这种方法正确估计post-CI的平均范围在3.1天以内。
