I recently developed a statistical method called “Cohesion” for quantifying the connectivity of microbial communities. The method and some applications are described in the associated ISME Journal article.
I recently made a GitHub repo for long-term maintenance and updates of the cohesion script. There are also some resources for helping to implement the method on your data. But don’t hesitate to contact me with questions if there’s something else you’re curious about!
If you’re wondering how the cohesion metrics could be useful for your work, you can check out an example of their utility in this paper, where I look for keystone microbes using the cohesion workflow.