Fig. 3: Biodiversity across the continent is likely underestimated, and future sampling efforts should consider biodiversity and uniqueness within each country.

A Number of unique taxa identified when subsampling an increasing number of samples from each country. Each dot represents the mean value of 1000 calculations of the number of unique taxa identified when subsampling at varying depths (i.e., number of samples). Each colour is a country. The grey area around the continental estimate (black line) represents the SD. The plot on the left was built after filtering taxa and samples as described in the methods section. The plot on the right was built without any filtering. B Map of the Local Representation Index (LRI). Blue represents countries where the proportion of microbiome samples is bigger than their share of the continental population. Orange shows the opposite. Grey indicates countries without data. C Boxplot and distribution of all Jaccard distances calculated using every pair of samples available for each country after filtering taxa and samples as described in “Methods”. The colours of the boxplot match the colour of the country given by its LRI.