3.3 Environmental responses of abundant and rare taxa
Environmental threshold analysis indicated that abundant taxa showed a
broader range of environmental thresholds than rare taxa for almost all
of the environmental and land use
types examined (Fig. 3a). Further, Blomberg’s K statistic
revealed that abundant taxa exhibited stronger phylogenetic signals for
almost all tested variables compared with the corresponding rare taxa
(Fig. 3b). In addition, we examined the potential ecological preferences
for the top 30 abundant and rare OTUs, respectively, and found that
abundant taxa exhibited stronger environmental associations than rare
taxa (Fig. 3c). This suggests that closely correlated taxa in the
abundant subcommunity exhibited more similar ecological preferences to
the measured environmental factors than those in the rare subcommunity.