Abstract
Plant–soil feedbacks (PSFs) involve changes to the soil wrought by plants, which change biotic and abiotic properties of the soil, affecting plants that grow in the soil at a later time. The importance of PSFs for understanding ecosystem functioning has been the focus of much recent research, for example, in predicting the consequences for agricultural production, biodiversity conservation, and plant population dynamics. Here, we describe an experiment designed to test PSFs left by plants with contrasting traits under field conditions. This is one of the first, large-scale field experiments of its kind. We removed the existent plant community and replaced it with target plant communities that conditioned the soil. These communities consisted of contrasting proportions of grass and forb cover and consisted of either fast- or slow-growing plants, in accordance with the plant economics spectrum. We chose this well-established paradigm because plants on opposite ends of this spectrum have developed contrasting strategies to cope with environmental conditions. This means they differ in their feedbacks with soil abiotic and biotic factors. The experimental procedure was repeated in two successive years in two different subplots in order to investigate temporal effects on soils that were conditioned by the same plant community. Our treatments were successful in creating plant communities that differed in their total percentage cover based on temporal conditioning, percentage of grasses versus forbs, and percentage of fast- versus slow-growing plants. As a result, we expect that the influence of these different plant communities will lead to different PSFs. The unique and novel design of this experiment allows us to simultaneously test for the impacts of temporal effects, plant community composition and plant growth strategy on PSFs. Here, we describe the experimental design and demonstrate why this effective design is ideal to advance our understanding of PSFs in the field.
Highlights
Plant–soil feedbacks (PSFs) are described as the influence of plants on the abiotic and biotic properties of the soil, thereby affecting the performance of plants that grow in the soil at a later time
Biotic soil factors that lead to PSFs could be shifts in soil microbial community composition (De Deyn, Quirk, & Bardgett 2011; Metcalfe, Fisher, & Wardle 2011)
The importance of PSFs for understanding ecosystem functioning has been the focus of much recent research, for example, in predicting the consequences for agricultural production (Mariotte et al 2018), biodiversity conservation (Teste et al 2017), and plant population dynamics (Bennett et al 2017), under global climate change
Summary
Plant–soil feedbacks (PSFs) are described as the influence of plants on the abiotic and biotic properties of the soil, thereby affecting the performance of plants that grow in the soil at a later time (van der Putten et al 2013). Feedbacks that result from shifts in soil microbial communities and nutrient availability can alter plant competitive interactions (Kaisermann, de Vries, Griffiths, & Bardgett 2017), which can affect plant performance, with consequences for plant community composition and productivity (Bauer, Blumenthal, Miller, Ferguson, & Reynolds 2017; Heinen, van der Sluijs, Biere, Harvey, & Bezemer 2018). Contrasting plant functional groups (i.e., grasses versus forbs) (Kos et al 2015) and plants with different traits, leading to different growth rates (i.e., fast- versus slow-growing plants) (Cortois, Schröder-Georgi, Weigelt, van der Putten, & De Deyn 2016), can alter the strength and direction of PSFs (Box 1). Timing of soil conditioning (i.e., temporal legacies) can affect feedbacks, with the order of which species conditions the soil first playing a role in determining the net effect of PSFs (Wubs & Bezemer 2017)
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