The book cover represents dust bunny distribution in ecological community data, with three levels of abstraction.

Background: a dust bunny is the accumulation of fluff, lint, and dirt particles in the corner of a room.

Middle: sample units in a 3-D species space, the three species forming a series of unimodal distributions along a single environmental gradient. Each axis represents abundance of one of the three species; each ball represents a sample unit. The vertical axis and the axis coming forward represent the two species peaking on the extremes of the gradient. The species peaking in the middle of the gradient is represented by the horizontal axis.

Foreground: The environmental gradient forms a strongly nonlinear shape in species space. The species represented by the vertical axis dominates one end of the environmental gradient, the species shown by the horizontal axis dominates the middle, and the species represented by the axis coming forward dominates the other end of the environmental gradient.

Successful representation of the environmental gradient requires a technique that can recover the underlying 1-D gradient from its contorted path through species space.