RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 A Family of Interaction-Adjusted Indices of Community Similarity
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 040097
DO 10.1101/040097
A1 Thomas Sebastian Benedikt Schmidt
A1 João Frederico Matias Rodrigues
A1 Christian von Mering
YR 2016
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/02/18/040097.abstract
AB Interactions between taxa are essential drivers of ecological community structure and dynamics, but they are not taken into account by traditional indices of diversity. In this study, we propose a novel family of indices that quantify community similarity in the context of taxa interaction networks. Using publicly available datasets, we assess the performance of two specific indices which are Taxa INteraction-Adjusted (TINA, based on taxa co-occurrence networks), and Phylogenetic INteraction-Adjusted (PINA, based on phylogenetic similarities). TINA and PINA outperformed traditional indices when partitioning human-associated microbial communities according to habitat, even for extremely downsampled datasets, and when organising ocean micro-eukaryotic plankton diversity according to geographical and physicochemical gradients. We argue that interaction-adjusted indices capture novel aspects of diversity outside the scope of traditional approaches, highlighting the biological significance of ecological association networks in the interpretation of community similarity.