Fig. 5.
The relationship between abundance and distribution of OTUs. A. The grey diamonds represent OTUs from the tropical forest dataset; the black circles represent OTUs from the trans-continental (Lauber et al. 2009) dataset. Here, we plotted the total abundance (within the entire dataset) of each OTU against its distribution. However, we also examined the relationship between the average of the relative abundance of each OTU within all assemblages against its distribution, which yielded similar results (data not shown). B. Heatmaps of the top ten most abundant OTUs for each study (tropical forest soils = top, intercontinental soils= bottom) showing the abundance of each OTU in each assemblage relative to its total abundance across the dataset. Each column represents a different assemblage; each row represents a different OTU; the color of the cells represents the relative abundance of that OTU within specific assemblages.