Seasonal variation visible despite undersampling, but subtler differences were masked
With 30 mg subsampled per plant we were able to see broad seasonal differences between May and September (Figure 6A). However, this reduced our power to differentiate among plants that harbored more similar communities. This became apparent when analyzing multiple replicates per plant (Figure 6B). When we visualized the communities recovered in each additional extraction, we observed significant variation among plants that was not apparent when we only had community data from single 30 mg extractions. With the additional extractions we observed strong host filtering among individual plants (PERMANOVA, R2 = 0.91, P < 0.001). Subsequent pairwise analyses revealed that the fungal community within individual plants varied significantly from all other plants (Pairwise PERMANOVA, P < 0.01), and that three of the plants appeared much more similar to each other than the other two plants, potentially due to factors associated with their spatial distribution within the site.