Table 1. Examples of community metabolic network analysis strategies.

A community-level metabolic network model can be defined in different ways. Three main approaches are shown here: lumped, compartmentalized and independent networks.

	Lumped	Compartmentalized	Independent
Properties	Supra-organism objective; unresolved community abundance	Community-level objective; scaling for individual abundances	Individual or multilevel objectives; individual abundances
Example references	[47]	[36,48]	[47,49]
Well suited for	Exploration of community metabolic potential with no need of individual resolution	Study, design and prediction of communities at steady state (controlled environments)	Study, design and prediction of dynamic communities and metabolic interaction with the environment