For those who are interested in upgrading their CANOCO licence, we summarize here the changes between version 4.5 and version 4.0. At the end, we also list the main differences with versions 3.x or 2.x.

• New Windows version of CanoDraw: CanoDraw for Windows version 4
• simplifies the production of publication-quality graphics for data sets of any size that Canoco for Windows can analyze.
• includes modern regression tools (GLM and GAM) for modelling and visualizing species response to the environment or to ordination axes.
• additional information and examples can be found at www.canodraw.com.
• New Windows program PrCoord which allows you to perform
• Principal Coordinates Analysis with a choice from eight popular dissimilarity measures, among which the Bray-Curtis, Jaccard and Sorensen indices.
• distance-based Redundancy Analysis.
• New Windows utility CanoMerge allows you to easily
• merge data sets compiled from multiple spreadsheets, working around the common 255-column limit of some spreadsheet programs.
• delete rare species from a data set and
• transform a CANOCO formatted file to a TAB-delimited file that can be imported in spreadsheet programs. CanoMerge so complements the WCanoImp facility already in Canoco 4.
• New numerics in Canoco itself:
• increased speed of calculations: speed is typically doubled even for data tables of moderate size
• increased precision of calculations, important for large data sets and for more accurate significance testing.
• increased capacity for analyzing large data sets
• New documentation:
• documentation for CanoDraw, PrCoord and CanoMerge integrated into the Canoco reference manual
• instructive examples of the new facilities and analysis options

Main differences between version 4.5 and the versions 2.x and 3.x

Version 4 of CANOCO has a new interface, new analyses, new tools, a new manual, a new booklet with reprints and can analyze even larger data sets:

• New interface: Canoco for Windows has a Windows user interface under Microsoft Windows ® 98, ME, Microsoft Windows NT®, Windows 2000, and XP, and is truly interactive with context-sensitive online help at each step. A console version of CANOCO 4 is also included and it is also available for other operating systems. Data can be now imported from spreadsheets.

• New analyses: The facilities for permutation tests are extended in version 4 to include tests for split-plot designs and related multi-level designs. The logic of the scaling of the species scores in linear methods has been extended and improved.
• New tools: The Canoco for Windows package now also includes:
• the full version of CanoDraw to create ordination diagrams and to explore ordination results with a large range of graphical and statistical methods; CanoDraw can be launched directly from Canoco for Windows environment and produces publication-quality graphs
• WCanoImp program to import data from spreadsheets directly via the Windows Clipboard
• CanoMerge program, which serves several purposes, namely: merging columns (variables) of existing data tables, filtering-out species with less than N occurrences, and exporting data in Canoco format into TAB-separated format, readily accepted by spreadsheet programs.
• PrCoord program for calculation of full solution for metric multidimensional scaling (analysis of principal coordinates, PCO). It accepts input in Canoco format and you can select one of several distance measures to calculate the matrix of inter-sample distances. Output is saved in Canoco format again, so it can be easily used to calculate a constrained solution (distance-based RDA) with Canoco.
• New manual: The manual for this release has been completely rewritten. Among others, it contains
• a Getting Started chapter for the novice to Canoco program
• an in-depth and up-to date explanation of the statistical methods in Canoco
• a chapter which guides you through the available methods
• a careful description of the results and how to interpret them
• detailed documentation of CanoDraw program and, last but not least,
• a large set of real-life examples, the data of which are included by special arrangement with the original authors in the Canoco package
• New book: The book, Unimodal Models to Relate Species to Environment, has been expanded to include recent papers. These articles from peer-reviewed journals represent a wide range of CANOCO applications. In the Examples chapter of the new manual, it is fully specified how the results can be obtained by using Canoco for Windows. For this, Canoco for Windows includes the underlying data sets and the CANOCO project files that allow you to redo the analyses yourself
• Even larger data sets: The move from the MS-DOS to 32-bit Windows (Windows 98 or Windows NT, 2K, XP) has enabled a substantial increase in the size of data that can be analyzed