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.