Figure 1: Taxon accumulation curve tracking observed number of taxa identified among PCR replicates as a function of read sampling depth for the PITS (a-k) and FITS (j-i) data sets. Plots are created from the average of 25 rarefactions at each round thousand read sampling depth between 1000 and 20,000 reads. After each round of rarefaction, we removed taxa present as fewer than five reads. Each line represents one PCR replicate. Termination of a line prior to the 20,000 read sampling depth denotes missing data. RAR = Retained after rarefaction, referring to the number of PCR replicates retained in analysis following rarefaction to read sampling depths of 5,000 and 10,000 reads. All 24 replicates for each of the six sites and both primers had sufficient data at 1,000 reads to be included in analysis (RAR.1k = 24 for all sites and amplicons).