Individual read abundances resulting from equal amounts of purified total DNA or target DNA fragments. Read abundance of specimens in artificial communities (n = 4) after pooling equimolar amounts of purified total DNA (orange) or equal amounts of target DNA fragments (grey) per specimen. Dots represent read abundances, means and ranges are indicated by vertical lines. Overall read abundance per method is illustrated by boxplots on the right. The lower and upper hinges of boxplots correspond to the first and third quartiles. The upper whisker extends from the hinge to the largest value no further than 1.5 times the inter-quartile range from the hinge. The lower whisker extends from the hinge to the smallest value at most 1.5 times the inter-quartile range from the hinge. Data beyond the end of the whiskers, i.e., outliers, are plotted individually.