How can I visualise the distance matrix produced by vegdist in Vegan?

Question

With the R package Vegan a distance matrix can be produced with the vegdist funciton:

distance.matrix <- vegdist(my.data)

I would like to actually show the distance matrix in a presentation to help explain what the NMDS plot of it is based on. How can I do this?

'distance.matrix' is 'Class 'dist' atomic...'. I just want to view it in a table showing how distant each site is from each other?

Answer 1

You want to see the distance matrix? What about typing its name?

distance.matrix
as.matrix(distance.matrix) # in full symmetric form

Or if you want to see it graphically, try

heatmap(as.matrix(distance.matrix))

Several packages probably have fancier tools.