Correlation between the total ionized hydrogen column density (top), neutral hydrogen column density (middle), and Doppler parameter (bottom) measured for each absorption feature and the completeness-corrected number of galaxies found in our VLT/VIMOS survey at the same redshift, divided by the cosmic average expected. The redshift of each BLA is indicated by the colorbar. The BLA close to a nearby galaxy from our VLT/MUSE survey is indicated with a diamond in the three panels (i.e., that at z ≈ 0.18919). The gray squares correspond to our NLA sample. The orange bars in the top panel quantify the range of variation in the inferred ionized hydrogen column density between the α = 0 and α = 1.5 scenarios (see Sect. 2.7).