Fig. 2

Impact of nest location on the skin microbiome. a Map of nest box locations (created with QGIS 3.8 [52]; both images are maps based on “Bing VirtualEarth”). Each circle indicates one nest box, marked with individual nest box (family) number. b Non-metric multidimensional ordination (nMDS) of skin microbiomes showing similarity between samples based on a Bray–Curtis similarity matrix (created with Primer-e [46]) The closer symbols appear on the plot, the more similar they are concerning their bacterial community. Blue-coloured shapes belong to samples from nest boxes 3, 4, 7 and 9 in the north, orange-coloured shapes to 13 and 15 in the west and green-coloured shapes to 17–30 in north-east. Symbols of same shape represent different members of a family (nest box). Axes of the nMDS plot are arbitrary and dimensionless