FIG 2.

Simulations of node (taxonomic unit) removals from the absolute, Erdős-Rényi, and Barabási networks. The panels show the impacts of removal of the highest-degree nodes and nodes with the highest levels of betweenness, as well as average values for removals of random nodes of 1,000 (absolute network) or 100,000 (random networks) random iterations, to the clustering coefficient (A), number of clusters (B), path length (C), and connectance (D). These simulations highlight the importance of the high-degree and high-betweenness nodes for the robustness of the microbial cooccurrence network in response to random taxon removal.