Abstract
All living things, like humans, animals, plants, and even microbes, need to take up the same nutrient elements to live, most importantly nitrogen and phosphorus. Understanding the cycling of these elements through the ecosystem is one key to understanding why ecosystems work the way they do. One of the questions we are asking is if the diversity of organisms, like plants or insects, is related to these nutrient cycles. When plant communities are made up of many different plant species, they seem to make better use of the available soil nutrients than plant communities made up of fewer species. This may be because of something called complementarity, which means different plant species access the available nutrients in different ways, for example from different soil depths. In this article, we will describe the connections between plant biodiversity and soil nutrient cycling and discuss the implications for the functioning of the whole ecosystem.
Highlights
All living things, like humans, animals, plants, and even microbes, need to take up the same nutrient elements to live, most importantly nitrogen and phosphorus
Sometimes there are more available nutrients than are needed because farmers add too much fertilizer to the soil, or because there is a warm day in winter when tiny organisms in soil recycle and release nutrients from dead material which are not needed by plants during their inactive phase
A connection between biodiversity and nitrogen in soil has been fairly well-established in experiments studying the e ects of biodiversity on ecosystems [ ]
Summary
Like humans, animals, plants, and even microbes, need to take up the same nutrient elements to live, most importantly nitrogen and phosphorus. One of the questions we are asking is if the diversity of organisms, like plants or insects, is related to these nutrient cycles. When plant communities are made up of many di erent plant species, they seem to make better use of the available soil nutrients than plant communities made up of fewer species. This may be because of something called complementarity, which means di erent plant species access the available nutrients in di erent ways, for example from di erent soil depths.
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