Fig. 1: Steps used to carry out the GAM-based transformation of time-series species abundance data prior to carrying out pairwise spearman correlation (SCC) and graphical lasso (Glasso) ecological network analyses.

The raw, species abundance data were first CLR-transformed (1). Generalized additive models (GAMs) were then fit to each species in the dataset (2) and the residuals of each GAM were checked for significant autocorrelation (3). The residuals of each GAM were extracted (4) and were used as input in the SCC and Glasso network analysis methods (5). Finally, the GAM-transformed network outputs were obtained (6; see text for additional details).