Evaluation of the effect of including juveniles on community
patterns
We checked the completeness of the sequenced replicates by means of
rarefaction curves, plotting the number of MOTUs per replicate against
an increasing number of reads (Fig. S1, Supporting information). To find
out if there were significant differences in the similarity patterns
among communities when including juveniles, we performed a non-metric
multidimensional scaling (NMDS) analysis based on the community
composition. We performed these analyses with presence/absence data both
with the information on adults alone and with adults and juveniles
together. For this, we used the metaMDS function in the package
“vegan” (Oksanen et al, 2019) in R (R Core Team, 2020). We applied a
Mantel test to assess the correlation and significance between the
distance matrices obtained from both approaches. We also applied an
ANalysis Of SIMilarity (ANOSIM) analysis to test if differences in
species composition between northern and southern parks were equally
recovered by adults and adults+juveniles approaches.