Disentangling direct and indirect effects of a legume shrub on its understorey community

Abstract

Direct and indirect interactions among plants contribute to shape community composition through above‐ and belowground processes. However, we have not disentangled yet the direct and indirect soil and canopy effects of dominants on understorey species. We addressed this issue in a semi‐arid system from southeast Spain dominated by the legume shrub Retama sphaerocarpa. During a year with an exceptionally dry spring, we removed the shrub canopy to quantify aboveground effects and compared removed‐canopy plots to open plots between shrubs to quantify soil effects, both with and without watering. We added a grass removal treatment in order to separate direct from indirect shrub effects and quantified biomass, abundance, richness and composition of the forb functional group. With watering, changes in forb biomass were primarily driven by indirect shrub effects, with contrasting negative soil and positive aboveground indirect effects; changes in forb abundance and composition were more influenced by direct shrub soil effects with contrasting species composition between open and Retama patches. As community composition was different between open and Retama patches the indirect effects of Retama on forb species did not concern forbs from the open community but forbs from Retama patches. Indirect effects are, thus, important at the functional group level rather than at the species level. Without watering, there were no significant interactions. Changes in species richness between treatments were weak and seldom significant. We conclude that shrub effects on understorey forbs are primarily due to their influence on soil properties, directly affecting forb species composition but indirectly affecting the biomass of the forbs of the Retama patches, and only with sufficient water.