Qualitative and quantitative similarity indices at the species level for the rare and abundant members of the community (defined at specific empirical cutoffs) as well as for the totals at both the phylum and the species levels.

*The empirical cutoff used to define rare and abundant members of the community. n: corresponds to the number of clones, a: corresponds to percentage abundance. Cutoffs n = 1, n≤2, n≤5, n≤10, a≤0.004% are rare cutoffs, while n>10, and a>1% are the abundant cutoff.
aThe phylogenetic level used to bin sequences into operational taxonomic units. OTU0.03 is the 97% cutoff for defining species.
bAll similarity indices values are averages ± standard deviations of all possible (6) pair wise comparisons.