Alpha rarefaction

In the legend below, click the box symbols to toggle the display of the line charts and click the circles to toggle the display of the box plots and scatter plots. If a color is visible in the symbol, the corresponding plot elements are displayed, otherwise they are hidden.

The box plots in the upper figure represent the distribution of the selected alpha diversity metric for each group of samples at each even sampling depth. The lower and upper whiskers of the box plot are the 9th and 91st percentiles of the distribution (respectively), while the lower and upper extents of the box are the 25th and 75th percentiles of the distribution (respectively). The horizontal bar through the middle of the box is the median of the dstribution (i.e., the 50th percentile). Outlier points of these distributions are not shown.

The line chart in the upper figure connects the median values of the alpha diversity metric distribution across the sampling depths.

If a sampling depth is higher than the number of sequences in a sample, that sample will not be included in the rarefaction plot at that sampling depth. The line chart in the lower figure illustrates the number of samples in each group (i.e., the sample size for each box plot) at each sampling depth.