Impact of interaction strength heterogeneity on the distinctness of community types.

A total of q = 500 local communities, each with p = 80 species randomly drawn from a universal pool of n = 100 species. The nominal components were drawn from , the interaction heterogeneity matrix elements were taken from and α is varied with the set of values {7, 3, 2, 1.6, 1.01} for each column in the figure. The topology component G has all elements equal to 1, giving a complete graph. The scaling factor was set at s = 0.07. (a) Histogram of the diagonal elements of the heterogeneity matrix H. (b) Visualization of the universal interaction matrix A as a weighted adjacency matrix of a digraph. (c) Principle coordinate analyses of the normalized steady state for each local community using the Jensen-Shannon distance. The Silhouette Index and optimal number of clusters are denoted. Further details can be found in Materials and Methods.