Fig. 4

Sub-sampling of permuted networks. The grey boxplots are obtained by calculating network metric values on 1000 permuted versions. The non-grey boxplots are the ones that we obtained in Fig. 3. The horizontal red line in each plot represents the observed metric value. Comparing the subsamples of the observed network with those of permuted networks identifies the sample proportion where the non-random aspects of the observed network start looking similar to those of random networks. For example, the mean strength of caribou subsamples in the observed network starts to overlap with the distribution of permuted subsamples at 70% level and becomes almost identical at 10% level. On the other hand, the mean strength distribution of pronghorn subsamples remains higher than those of permuted subsamples distribution at as low as 10% level