Fig. 4

Neutrality test and LIMITS results. a The neutrality test distinguishes non-neutral from neutral time series. A long interval is a confounding factor. b The neutrality test also classifies short time series correctly. c The accuracy of the interaction matrix inferred with LIMITS is high for time series from the three deterministic models, but decreases with connectance. d The goodness of fit of time series to the Ricker model is high for all time series except for the unstructured DM data. The goodness of fit was quantified as the correlation between the original time series and the time series predicted with the Ricker model parameterized with LIMITS. Plots were made with ggplot2 [52]. The dashed lines in a and b indicate the value corresponding to a p value of 0.05. Values above represent significant p values, for which neutrality is rejected