I was working on the Beta-diversity on continuous variables and although I know I have to calculate the distance matrix and then run the mantel test, I am a little confused.
Can you help me understand the results from bioenv and what I can do with these results? For example, since I created the distance matrix based on the year of the fire, does the bioenv results show what is helping explain community composition in each fire.
Also, if I wanted to look at unit differences, do I need to create another distance matrix?
Laslty, in R-STUDIO, we do mantel test on the variables that are significant, but I am unsure on how to decipher that here, so should I perform a mantel test on all variables and see?
What does that mean? You created a distance matrix from that metadata category using qiime metadata distance-matrix? Such a distance matrix would be used with the mantel test, but not with bioenv (you would use the distance matrix based on feature data made with qiime diversity)
bioenv is going to figure out which metadata columns (and combinations) are most closely associated with your distance matrix. So, e.g., how years of recovery since last fire associate with feature diversity.
How do you determine significance? With bioenv? If so, then yes you can do that here — use bioenv as an exploratory method and then follow up with mantel on specific variables.