A family of interaction-adjusted indices of community similarity

Abstract

Interactions between taxa are essential drivers of ecological community structure and dynamics, but they are not taken into account by traditional indices of β diversity. In this study, we propose a novel family of indices that quantify community similarity in the context of taxa interaction networks. Using publicly available datasets, we assessed the performance of two specific indices that are Taxa INteraction-Adjusted (TINA, based on taxa co-occurrence networks), and Phylogenetic INteraction-Adjusted (PINA, based on phylogenetic similarities). TINA and PINA outperformed traditional indices when partitioning human-associated microbial communities according to habitat, even for extremely downsampled datasets, and when organising ocean micro-eukaryotic plankton diversity according to geographical and physicochemical gradients. We argue that interaction-adjusted indices capture novel aspects of diversity outside the scope of traditional approaches, highlighting the biological significance of ecological association networks in the interpretation of community similarity.