Cumulative SFE above a minimum column density contour as a function of column density for nearby clouds. The orange and green curves indicate the weighted averages over all significant cloud estimates with SFRs derived from Class I and Class II YSO counting, respectively. The shaded areas indicate the corresponding statistical uncertainties (cf. Eq. (9) in Sect. 5.3). The dashed-dotted lines mark the standard deviations of the sample of cloud SFE estimates above each $N_{{\text{H}}_2}$.