Ecological similarity of communities among treatments
Nonmetric MultiDimensional Scaling showed a stress value of 0.13 for Bact02, 0.14 for Fung02 and 0.12 for Euka02. For each of the three markers, the NMDS plots obtained for the five sample preservation treatments were extremely similar, and the ecological differences among the three habitats were clearly identified by all the preservation treatments (Fig. 3).
The multivariate correlation between the communities obtained with the five treatments was always very strong (Procrustes-modified correlation: for all comparisons between “control” and treatments r ≥ 0.84,P < 0.0001; Fig. 4) indicating, for all markers, that most of the variation of retrieved communities was shared across all the treatments. Procrustes correlations were particularly high for Fung02 and Euka02 (all r ≥ 0.9), and between “control” and treatments 2 and 3 (all r ≥ 0.93; Fig. 4).