Abstract
Plants influence their soil environment, which affects the next generation of seedlings that can be established. While research has shown that such plant–soil feedbacks occur in the presence of mycorrhizal fungi, it remains unclear when and how mycorrhizal fungi mediate the direction and strength of feedbacks in tree communities. Here we show that arbuscular mycorrhizal and ectomycorrhizal fungal guilds mediate plant–soil feedbacks differently to influence large-scale patterns such as tree species coexistence and succession. When seedlings are grown under the same mycorrhizal type forest, arbuscular mycorrhizal plant species exhibit negative or neutral feedbacks and ectomycorrhizal plant species do neutral or positive feedbacks. In contrast, positive and neutral feedbacks dominate when seedlings are grown in associations within the same versus different mycorrhizal types. Thus, ectomycorrhizal communities show more positive feedbacks than arbuscular mycorrhizal communities, potentially explaining why most temperate forests are ectomycorrhizal.
Highlights
Plants influence their soil environment, which affects the generation of seedlings that can be established
When comparing plant–soil feedbacks associated with heterospecific saplings in matching versus mismatching mesocosms, we found positive to neutral feedbacks at the mesocosm-scale
While the growth differences between conspecific versus heterospecific saplings varied depending on sapling–seedling species combinations, our results show some signature of negative or neutral feedbacks in arbuscular mycorrhizal plant species and neutral or positive feedbacks in ectomycorrhizal plant species when seedlings were grown in the soil conditioned by saplings of the same mycorrhizal types
Summary
Plants influence their soil environment, which affects the generation of seedlings that can be established. To better understand how plant–soil feedbacks affect seedling community assembly in natural communities, emphasis should shift from the feedback effects/responses of one plant species on another (e.g., home-versus-away experiments) to the feedbacks in multi-species community contexts In such contexts, plant–soil feedbacks may emerge as a general community-scale process, where multiple seedlings and residents collectively form common mycelial networks belowground via mycorrhizal fungi[19,20,21,22]. While there is some evidence that plant–soil feedbacks have a greater impact in mixed-species communities[10], few studies have investigated feedbacks in the presence of microbiota potentially connecting neighboring resident trees and seedlings via mycelial networks Such community-scale feedbacks may influence seedling community assembly differently from the commonly studied species-pairwise feedbacks (possibly through different belowground mechanisms)
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