Fig 4.

The ability to detect true differences in treatment groups for alpha (A) and beta (B) diversity metrics is greatest when communities differing in the relative abundance of their OTUs are normalized by rarefaction. For each data set, samples were randomly assigned to one of two community distributions where the abundance of OTUs differed. To calculate the power for each data sets, data sets were regenerated 100 times and differences in alpha diversity were tested using a Wilcoxon test (A) and differences in beta diversity were tested using PERMANOVA (B) at a 5% threshold. The power was the number of times a data set yielded a significant result.