This chapter introduces the statistical methods commonly applied by ecologists working with community data, by giving a general overview of the available tools. In this way, the chapter places joint species distribution models in general – and Hierarchical Modelling of Species Communities (HMSC) in particular – in the broader context of statistical community ecology. The chapter first introduces the wide variety of ordination methods and the substantial contributions they have made to empirical research in community ecology. The chapter next discusses the approaches of co-occurrence analysis and generalised linear models applied to diversity metrics. The chapter concludes by introducing species distribution modelling, highlighting the differences between single-species and joint species distribution models. Although the statistical methods are explained only verbally in this chapter, they are further discussed elsewhere in the book – namely, Chapters 4–8 give the statistical details on single-species and joint species distribution models, and Chapter 11 illustrates ordinations, co-occurrence analysis and joint species distribution models by applying them to a real data example.