I am having a hard time understanding what these box plots are on my curve. I have created curves to show the individual replicates of my pooled samples. In the curve below, I separated my CPAug sample into the three replicates.
Because these are individual replicates, I do not understand the reason for a box plot.
Is the sequencing depth on the x axis in thousands?
This visualizer computes one or more alpha diversity metrics at multiple sampling depths, in steps between 1 (optionally controlled with --p-min-depth ) and the value provided as --p-max-depth. At each sampling depth step, 10 rarefied tables will be generated, and the diversity metrics will be computed for all samples in the tables. The number of iterations (rarefied tables computed at each sampling depth) can be controlled with --p-iterations. Average diversity values will be plotted for each sample at each even sampling depth...
--p-steps INTEGER The number of rarefaction depths to include between
Range(2, None) min-depth and max-depth. [default: 10]
--p-iterations INTEGER The number of rarefied feature tables to compute at
Range(1, None) each step. [default: 10]
The 10 rarefied tables mentioned in the tutorial quoted above come from the default value for --p-iterations mentioned in the docstring. For each sampling depth step, there is a box plot to help visualize the results.
As for your second question, no that number is not in the thousands. You can check your feature-table summarize visualization to see what the deepest sequenced sample is. That way you can make sure that you set the max depth accordingly.
I hope that helps but please let me know if I can further clarify anything!