Ecological landscapes guide the assembly of optimal microbial communities
Fig 6
Contribution of higher-order interactions.
Including higher order terms in the fitting model reduced the variance in the data not explained by the fit. First order fitting models are linear, second—quadratic, etc. The decrease in unexplained variance was approximately exponential. We used S = 16, Mconsumed = 2 for specialists and Mconsumed = 14 for generalists; the community function was Shannon diversity. All other simulation parameters are the same as in Fig 5.