Background The Swedish Association of local authorities and regions in collaboration with the national board of health and welfare produces the yearly “Swedish Health Care Report” in order to provide evaluations of the hospitals and counties in Sweden for both the politicians and the general public. Method We describe several standard methods which have been used to present the performance of each hospital or county: Forest plot (FL), League Table (LT), League Plot (LP) and Funnel Plot (FP). Using simulation technique to produce the League Plot of rank is also presented in order to illustrate the unreliable of the ranking principle. Results The league plot with confidence interval is easily understood by people, but it should provide the total number of operations (sample size) as well. The resulting multiple-indicators system gives a clear overview of the whole system, but the cut-off points used in the traffic light method is not the best choice. Several possible improved methodologies are: A league plot traffic light method and a standard funnel plot traffic light method is recommended when aiming at finding the outliers; A p=0.67 funnel plot traffic light method is suggested when wishing to divide the units into approximately equally large groups; A one-side traffic light method seems to be a wonderful choice when focusing on the bad performance units.

The variation in community composition among sites is often used to gain insight into the processes of plant community assembly. In this study, we looked for evidence of environmentally and spatially mediated community assembly mechanisms in a temperate forest in eastern North America. To test this, we measured, identified and mapped all woody stems ≥1 cm in diameter at breast height (DBH) in 12 ha of a 20 ha forest plot. We used principal coordinates of neighbor matrices (PCNM) to obtain variables that modelled spatial processes (eg. dispersal, drift) at the community level. Topographic variables (slope, elevation, convexity, aspect) were used to model environmental conditions. Variation partitioning was used to isolate the unique and shared effects of topographic and spatial variables on community composition. We were also interested in studying how associations with the environment change with tree size. For this we assessed the abundance of a subset of focal species in response to topography as well as human disturbance. Species abundance were divided into three stem size classes: small (< 5 cm), medium (≥5 cm and < 15), and big (≥15 cm). We found that topography and space jointly explained 63% of the variation in community composition. This variation was almost entirely spatially structured with the component of pure topography only contributing 1% to the total explained variation. A redundancy analysis showed that slope and elevation were the most important topographic variables structuring the distribution of trees. The focal species had largely independent distributions across the environmental gradients and three of the five species showed within-species differences associated with size class effects on the relationship with topography and human disturbance. The implications of these results are relevant to conservation efforts and suggest that large contiguous areas of heterogeneous environments are essential in maintaining biodiversity. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)