Cohesion: a method for quantifying the connectivity of microbial communities

Abstract The ability to predict microbial community dynamics lags behind the quantity of data available in these systems. Most predictive models use only environmental parameters, although a long history of ecological literature suggests that community complexity should also be an informative parameter. Thus, we hypothesize that incorporating information about a community’s complexity might improve predictive power in microbial models. Here, we present a new metric, called community ‘cohesion,’ that quantifies the degree of connectivity of a microbial community. We analyze six long-term (10+ years) microbial data sets using the cohesion metrics and validate our approach using data sets where absolute…

• NS
  National Science Foundation

  Awards: 1344254, NTL-LTER DEB-1440297, 1256259, DEB-1344254, DEB-1440297, 1440297, DGE-1256259