Fig. 4

Distributional patterns and community composition of freshwater meiofauna. A Dendrogram cluster showing the similarity (Jaccard index) of heterotrophic protist communities of the five sediment samples in regard to species richness based on incidence-based data (presence/absence) using UPGMA clustering. Number of freshwater ASVs_80-100% (grey bars) and number of morphotypes (pink bars) related to the major taxonomic groups are shown. B Heatmap of meiofauna ASVs with a 98–100% sequence similarity and taxonomic clustering on predicted genus level. Shown are the first 35 most abundant predicted genera (out of 67 genera) with class and genus level. In several cases reference sequences were not assigned to genus/species level, thus, the deepest taxonomic level such as the order is shown. Numbers within the heatmap correspond to the number of ASVs_98-100% assigned to these genera for each of the five sites. Taxonomic genus rank corresponds to genus levels in the PR² database classification. The sequential color code corresponds to the relative abundance of reads assigned to the genus and is relative to all reads assigned to the meiofauna size classes with a sequence similarity of 98–100%. Pink asterisks indicate, if genera could also be detected morphologically. Organism silhouettes are from PhyloPic [69]. Contributed by Mathilde Cordellier, 2020 (Arachnida), Birgit Lang, 2015 (Collembola), Maxime Dahirel, 2018 (Ostracoda), Michelle Site, 2014 (Nematoda) under License Attribution 3.0 Unported (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). Contributed by Siel Wellens, 2019 (Copepoda), T. Michael Keesey, 2013 (Branchiopoda), Scott Hartmann, 2013 (Gastrotricha) and Levi Simons, 2023 (Cestoda and Rotifera) under license CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. Contributed by Julie Blommaert, 2020 (Rotatoria) under license Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported. Contributed by B. Duygu Özpolat, 2016 (Oligochaeta) under license Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported