Adding insect abundance data to SparCC Analysis

Question

[GlycineMax]

Hello, I have a quick question.

I have a metagenomics dataset (16S + ITS2) from soil samples, from where I also collected the abundance of an insect (counts of that insect per soil sample). Would it be statistically correct to include my insect count in my SparCC analysis? My objective is to detect any possible correlations among my 16S/ITS2 taxa and insect abundance?

Thank you!

[Kevin Blighe]

Cross-posted: https://support.bioconductor.org/p/9138024/