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).