Adding ellipses to a principal component analysis (PCA) plot

Question

I am having trouble adding grouping variable ellipses on top of an individual site PCA factor plot which also includes PCA variable factor arrows.

My code:

Answer 1

Since you do not mention this in your question, I will assume that the package you used is vegan, since it has the function rda() that accepts the scale=TRUE argument.

Your initial plot() call was modified as some of variables are not given.

library(vegan)
prin_comp<-rda(data[,2:9], scale=TRUE)
pca_scores<-scores(prin_comp)

plot(pca_scores$sites[,1],
     pca_scores$sites[,2],
     pch=21,
     bg=as.numeric(data$Waterbody),
     xlim=c(-2,2), 
     ylim=c(-2,2))
arrows(0,0,pca_scores$species[,1],pca_scores$species[,2],lwd=1,length=0.2)

To make ellipses, function ordiellipse() of package vegan is used. As arguments PCA analysis object and grouping variable must be provided. To control number of points included in ellipse, argument conf= can be used.

ordiellipse(prin_comp,data$Waterbody,conf=0.99)