Fig 5. Effect of pooled extraction replicate number on OTU richness and Shannon diversity.

Mean diversity estimates based on repeated (i = 100) random selection of replicates to pool followed by random sub-sampling of OTUs to a total sequence depth of 15,000 reads per sample (divided equally between selected replicates). Filtering to protist or metazoan OTUs was carried out after sub-sampling. Error bars represent the standard error of values from the bootstrapping procedure described above.