Figure 3

Relationship between diversity and variability of microbial communities associated with each body habitat. Diversity was measured as the median Shannon Diversity Index for each individual over the 3-month sampling period. Variability was measured as intra-individual median weighted (white boxes) and unweighted (gray circles) UniFrac distance. Each point represents values of the time-series data for one individual. Spearman rank correlation coefficients are presented for statistically significant relationships (P ≤0.01). Note that similar patterns were observed with other alpha diversity metrics (Additional file 11).