Fig. 2

Variable importance from random forests. A Variable importance in the random forest model including all benthic, fish, microbial, and water chemistry variables. B Variable importance in independent random forests for inhabited (yellow) and uninhabited (orange) sites. In A, purple bars indicate variables with p-value < 0.05 in the permutation test, while gray bars indicate p-values > 0.05. Stars indicate the p-values in the random forest permutation test (***p-value < 0.001, **p-value < 0.01, *p-value < 0.05). Light purple indicates variables removed by the conditional random forests