Choice of transformation for my data set

My data set contains the percentage cover of various plant species, on a rocky substrate. The problem I am having is that the substrate was often completely bare of any plant life. Due to this, a large proportion of the quadrats that I used contained zero percentage cover, which leads me to having heavily right-skewed data.

Therefore, I have to transform my data before I am able to calculate an ANOVA test. I originally went ahead with using the Arcsine transformation, but this still leaves my data right skewed, however, if I do log10 the distribution is normal.

The answer might seem obvious, but the majority of the online material I look at insists on using Arcsine for percentage cover, but this does not normalise my distribution as well as log10 does. Which one should I use?

• Is percent cover the response here? I'd add that you didn't explain what you did to push zeros through logarithms. – Nick Cox Jan 12 '18 at 16:06
• Yes percent cover is the response variable here. As for pushing zeros through logarithms, I had assumed that since there was no presence within the quadrat, the answer would be zero, in effect I did not log10 zeros. However, this is based on an assumption, correct me if what I have done is wrong. – Charlie Jones Jan 12 '18 at 16:18
• Sorry, but I am not clear on what you did. Zero is the logarithm of 1. The logarithm of zero is undefined. That is the problem. – Nick Cox Jan 12 '18 at 16:20

I am having to deal quite often with the same kind of analysis. Since the data are percentages (i.e. percent cover) the ideal way, in my opinion, is to use beta regression using the betareg package in R for example. However, since zeros are part of our life when doing vegetation surveys, betareg cannot be used as it requires the interval (0,1). Hence, I moved to zero-inflated beta regression models via the gamlss package (see also my question here). This package comes with a lot of other useful distributions. However, it becomes problematic when you have factor levels (e.g. treatments) and you want to do for example Tukey adjusted multiple means comparisons. @rvl who wrote the emmeans package provided preliminary support to do this, however, with a word of caution. Note though that for betareg models the emmeans package works perfectly well.
The next set of tools to analyze vegetation cover data would be Bayesian, as implemented in the zoib package for example. However, I haven't explored the Bayesian models yet but it's certainly on the to-do list.