I’m working with a dataset of 350 plant species, their invasion status (native to the country, established or invasive) and 11 categorical traits of them (leaf shape or flower colour, for example). My goal is to compare if their invasion status is explained by their traits, but when I conduct the FAMD analysis it shows a very low variance explained by the data. To clarify, I previously know that some of the traits are correlated with the invasion status.

To do so, I’m building a FAMD but I get a very low variance (~ 3% by each component) and I don’t know what am I doing wrong. I’ve seen that dimensionality may be important, but watching the screeplot, the maximum variance explained is 4%.

Maybe the problem is that I’m using leaf, flowers, fruits and bark traits all at once, and maybe some traits depend on others and I should reduce the number of traits.

I’m new in these kind of analyses, so any help by experienced programmers will be a gift to me.