Mesquite effects on understory plants

The goal of the analysis was to determine the response—in terms of density and distribution—of understory plants to mesquite. Multiple types of response data were collected for many species along the same sampling transects within a spatial hierarchy (transects within exclosures within pastures). To avoid the concerns of inflated Type I error posed by multiple individual analyses, we used a single statistical model with a multivariate response and hierarchical random effects.