Ecological landscapes guide the assembly of optimal microbial communities
Fig 8
Estimating ruggedness from limited data.
(A) True and estimated ruggedness are tightly correlated when only 1% of the data is available for the estimation. The data are from Fig 5, and each point corresponds to a landscape with a different degree of niche overlap. (B) The accuracy of the estimation improves with the amount of available data for all ruggedness measures. (C) The estimated ruggedness remain highly informative of search efficacy. The utility of the ruggedness estimate, |ρ|, is measured as the magnitude of the Spearman’s correlation coefficient between search efficacy and estimated ruggedness. Note that |ρ| remained close to one even for very low fractions of the data for which R2 in panel B started to decrease rapidly suggesting that deviations between predicted and actual roughness (see A and B) do not impede the prediction of search success. For this figure, the community function is the Shannon diversity. Similar results were obtained for other functions tested.