Fig. 1

Fecal egg counts and gastrointestinal nematode species proportions of heifer fecal sample pools from western Canadian beef farms. Samples were pooled at the provincial level with two pools per province categorized based on herd size (small ≤ 300 cow-calf pairs, large > 300 cow-calf pairs). Three independent aliquots (R1, R2, R3) of 1000 third-stage larvae were taken for ITS-2 rDNA nemabiome metabarcoding for each pool. a represents the arithmetic mean of individual animal strongyle-type fecal egg counts of each provincial pool. b indicates the relative gastrointestinal nematode species proportions determined by ITS-2 rDNA nemabiome metabarcoding of third-stage larvae pooled by herd size and province