Rarefying ecological distances with R: Should you? (CC189)

Rarefaction of ecological distances and alpha diversity metrics has become controversial in the microbial ecology field. In this Code Club, Pat will use R to look at issues that surround the controversy. Pat will generate a null community distribution model and then assess the impact of rarefaction using the vegdist and avgdist functions from the vegan R package. He'll show how to synthesize and visualize the data using tools from dplyr, ggplot2, and other tidyverse packages. You can find my blog post for this episode at https://www.riffomonas.org/code_club/.... The data were generated in our Kozich et al. 2013 paper (http://doi.org/10.1128/AEM.01043-13) using samples from the Schloss et al. 2012 paper (http://doi.org/10.4161/gmic.21008). #vegdist #avgdist #vegan #ggplot2 #R #Rstudio #Rstats Want more practice on the concepts covered in Code Club? You can sign up for my weekly newsletter at https://shop.riffomonas.org/youtube to get practice problems, tips, and insights. If you're interested in taking an upcoming 3 day R workshop be sure to check out our schedule at https://riffomonas.org/workshops/ You can also find complete tutorials for learning R with the tidyverse using... Microbial ecology data: https://www.riffomonas.org/minimalR/ General data: https://www.riffomonas.org/generalR/ 0:00 What happens if you rarefy your data? If you don't? 4:13 Generating a null community model 11:56 Calculating distances with and without rarefaction 13:35 Comparing distance calculation approaches 17:17 Assessing sensitivity to difference in sampling depth