Fig. 3

Distribution of the endemic and bipolar cosmopolitan snow algae obtained from each region based on ITS2 unique sequences from high-throughput sequencing. OTUs and sequencing read numbers are shown. a Unique sequences. b Sequencing read numbers of the unique sequences. Bars are coloured according to geographical region of the glacier: blue, Antarctica; red, Svalbard; green, Greenland; yellow, Alaska. c Co-occurrence networks for ITS2 unique sequences of snow algae from both polar regions. Unique sequences are coloured according to geographical region of the glacier, as noted above. The arrow points to the cosmopolitan-distributed phylotypes