Consequences of Local Conspecific Density Effects for Plant Diversity and Community Dynamics.

Conspecific density dependence (CDD) in plant populations is widespread, most likely caused by local-scale biotic interactions, and has potentially important implications for biodiversity, community composition, and ecosystem processes. However, progress in this important area of ecology has been hindered by differing viewpoints on CDD across subfields in ecology, lack of synthesis across CDD-related frameworks, and misunderstandings about how empirical measurements of local CDD fit within the context of broader ecological theories on community assembly and diversity maintenance. Here, we propose a conceptual synthesis of local-scale CDD and its causes, including species-specific antagonistic and mutualistic interactions.

Restoration age affects microbial-herbaceous plant interactions in an oak woodland.

In degraded ecosystems, soil microbial communities (SMCs) may influence the outcomes of ecological restoration. Restoration practices can affect SMCs, though it is unclear how variation in the onset of restoration activities in woodlands affects SMCs, how those SMCs influence the performance of hard-to-establish woodland forbs, and how different woodland forbs shape SMCs. In this study, we quantified soil properties and species abundances in an oak woodland restoration chronosequence (young, intermediate, and old restorations).

Globally, plant-soil feedbacks are weak predictors of plant abundance.

Plant-soil feedbacks (PSFs) have been shown to strongly affect plant performance under controlled conditions, and PSFs are thought to have far reaching consequences for plant population dynamics and the structuring of plant communities. However, thus far the relationship between PSF and plant species abundance in the field is not consistent. Here, we synthesize PSF experiments from tropical forests to semiarid grasslands, and test for a positive relationship between plant abundance in the field and PSFs estimated from controlled bioassays.

Soil biota increase the likelihood for coexistence among competing plant species.

Theory predicts that stable species coexistence will occur when population growth rates of competitively dominant species are suppressed when at high conspecific density. Although there is now compelling evidence that plant communities exhibit negative density dependence, the relative importance of the underlying processes leading to these patterns is rarely tested. We coupled reciprocal greenhouse and field experiments with community dynamics modeling to untangle the relative importance of soil biota from competition as stabilizing forces to coexistence.

Resistance Genes Affect How Pathogens Maintain Plant Abundance and Diversity.

AbstractSpecialized pathogens are thought to maintain plant community diversity; however, most ecological studies treat pathogens as a black box. Here we develop a theoretical model to test how the impact of specialized pathogens changes when plant resistance genes (R-genes) mediate susceptibility. This work synthesizes two major hypotheses: the gene-for-gene model of pathogen resistance and the Janzen-Connell hypothesis of pathogen-mediated coexistence.

Abundance, origin, and phylogeny of plants do not predict community-level patterns of pathogen diversity and infection.

Pathogens have the potential to shape plant community structure, and thus, it is important to understand the factors that determine pathogen diversity and infection in communities. The abundance, origin, and evolutionary relationships of plant hosts are all known to influence pathogen patterns and are typically studied separately. We present an observational study that examined the influence of all three factors and their interactions on the diversity of and infection of several broad taxonomic groups of foliar, floral, and stem pathogens across three sites in a temperate grassland in the central United States.

Prairie plants harbor distinct and beneficial root-endophytic bacterial communities.

Plant-soil feedback studies attempt to understand the interplay between composition of plant and soil microbial communities. A growing body of literature suggests that plant species can coexist when they interact with a subset of the soil microbial community that impacts plant performance. Most studies focus on the microbial community in the soil rhizosphere; therefore, the degree to which the bacterial community within plant roots (root-endophytic compartment) influences plant-microbe interactions remains relatively unknown.

Author Correction: Mutualist and pathogen traits interact to affect plant community structure in a spatially explicit model.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Mutualist and pathogen traits interact to affect plant community structure in a spatially explicit model.

Empirical studies show that plant-soil feedbacks (PSF) can generate negative density dependent (NDD) recruitment capable of maintaining plant community diversity at landscape scales. However, the observation that common plants often exhibit relatively weaker NDD than rare plants at local scales is difficult to reconcile with the maintenance of overall plant diversity. We develop a spatially explicit simulation model that tracks the community dynamics of microbial mutualists, pathogens, and their plant hosts.

Negative plant-soil feedbacks are stronger in agricultural habitats than in forest fragments in the tropical Andes.

There is now strong evidence suggesting that interactions between plants and their species-specific antagonistic microbes can maintain native plant community diversity. In contrast, the decay in diversity in plant communities invaded by nonnative plant species might be caused by weakening negative feedback strengths, perhaps because of the increased relative importance of plant mutualists such as arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF). Although the vast majority of studies examining plant-soil feedbacks have been conducted in a single habitat type, there are fewer studies that have tested how the strength and direction of these feedbacks change across habitats with differing dominating plants.

When and where plant-soil feedback may promote plant coexistence: a meta-analysis.

Plant-soil feedback (PSF) theory provides a powerful framework for understanding plant dynamics by integrating growth assays into predictions of whether soil communities stabilise plant-plant interactions. However, we lack a comprehensive view of the likelihood of feedback-driven coexistence, partly because of a failure to analyse pairwise PSF, the metric directly linked to plant species coexistence. Here, we determine the relative importance of plant evolutionary history, traits, and environmental factors for coexistence through PSF using a meta-analysis of 1038 pairwise PSF measures.

Evidence of within-species specialization by soil microbes and the implications for plant community diversity.

Microbes are thought to maintain diversity in plant communities by specializing on particular species, but it is not known whether microbes that specialize within species (i.e., on genotypes) affect diversity or dynamics in plant communities.

Responses of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi to long-term inorganic and organic nutrient addition in a lowland tropical forest.

Improved understanding of the nutritional ecology of arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi is important in understanding how tropical forests maintain high productivity on low-fertility soils. Relatively little is known about how AM fungi will respond to changes in nutrient inputs in tropical forests, which hampers our ability to assess how forest productivity will be influenced by anthropogenic change. Here we assessed the influence of long-term inorganic and organic nutrient additions and nutrient depletion on AM fungi, using two adjacent experiments in a lowland tropical forest in Panama.

Response to Comment on "Plant diversity increases with the strength of negative density dependence at the global scale".

Chisholm and Fung claim that our method of estimating conspecific negative density dependence (CNDD) in recruitment is systematically biased, and present an alternative method that shows no latitudinal pattern in CNDD. We demonstrate that their approach produces strongly biased estimates of CNDD, explaining why they do not detect a latitudinal pattern. We also address their methodological concerns using an alternative distance-weighted approach, which supports our original findings of a latitudinal gradient in CNDD and a latitudinal shift in the relationship between CNDD and species abundance.

Response to Comment on "Plant diversity increases with the strength of negative density dependence at the global scale".

Hülsmann and Hartig suggest that ecological mechanisms other than specialized natural enemies or intraspecific competition contribute to our estimates of conspecific negative density dependence (CNDD). To address their concern, we show that our results are not the result of a methodological artifact and present a null-model analysis that demonstrates that our original findings-(i) stronger CNDD at tropical relative to temperate latitudes and (ii) a latitudinal shift in the relationship between CNDD and species abundance-persist even after controlling for other processes that might influence spatial relationships between adults and recruits.

Plant diversity increases with the strength of negative density dependence at the global scale.

Theory predicts that higher biodiversity in the tropics is maintained by specialized interactions among plants and their natural enemies that result in conspecific negative density dependence (CNDD). By using more than 3000 species and nearly 2.4 million trees across 24 forest plots worldwide, we show that global patterns in tree species diversity reflect not only stronger CNDD at tropical versus temperate latitudes but also a latitudinal shift in the relationship between CNDD and species abundance.

Host-specific effects of soil microbial filtrates prevail over those of arbuscular mycorrhizae in a fragmented landscape.

Plant-soil interactions have been shown to determine plant community composition in a wide range of environments. However, how plants distinctly interact with beneficial and detrimental organisms across mosaic landscapes containing fragmented habitats is still poorly understood. We experimentally tested feedback responses between plants and soil microbial communities from adjacent habitats across a disturbance gradient within a human-modified tropical montane landscape.

Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal community composition is altered by long-term litter removal but not litter addition in a lowland tropical forest.

Tropical forest productivity is sustained by the cycling of nutrients through decomposing organic matter. Arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi play a key role in the nutrition of tropical trees, yet there has been little experimental investigation into the role of AM fungi in nutrient cycling via decomposing organic material in tropical forests. We evaluated the responses of AM fungi in a long-term leaf litter addition and removal experiment in a tropical forest in Panama.

An ectomycorrhizal nitrogen economy facilitates monodominance in a neotropical forest.

Tropical forests are renowned for their high diversity, yet in many sites a single tree species accounts for the majority of the individuals in a stand. An explanation for these monodominant forests remains elusive, but may be linked to mycorrhizal symbioses. We tested three hypotheses by which ectomycorrhizas might facilitate the dominance of the tree, Oreomunnea mexicana, in montane tropical forest in Panama.

Pervasive and strong effects of plants on soil chemistry: a meta-analysis of individual plant 'Zinke' effects.

Plant species leave a chemical signature in the soils below them, generating fine-scale spatial variation that drives ecological processes. Since the publication of a seminal paper on plant-mediated soil heterogeneity by Paul Zinke in 1962, a robust literature has developed examining effects of individual plants on their local environments (individual plant effects). Here, we synthesize this work using meta-analysis to show that plant effects are strong and pervasive across ecosystems on six continents.

Unique competitive effects of lianas and trees in a tropical forest understory.

Lianas are an important component of tropical forests, contributing up to 25% of the woody stems and 35% of woody species diversity. Lianas invest less in structural support but more in leaves compared to trees of similar biomass. These physiological and morphological differences suggest that lianas may interact with neighboring plants in ways that are different from similarly sized trees.

Liana abundance, diversity, and distribution on Barro Colorado Island, Panama.

Lianas are a key component of tropical forests; however, most surveys are too small to accurately quantify liana community composition, diversity, abundance, and spatial distribution - critical components for measuring the contribution of lianas to forest processes. In 2007, we tagged, mapped, measured the diameter, and identified all lianas ≥1 cm rooted in a 50-ha plot on Barro Colorado Island, Panama (BCI). We calculated liana density, basal area, and species richness for both independently rooted lianas and all rooted liana stems (genets plus clones).

Complex facilitation and competition in a temperate grassland: loss of plant diversity and elevated CO2 have divergent and opposite effects on oak establishment.

Encroachment of woody vegetation into grasslands is a widespread phenomenon that alters plant community composition and ecosystem function. Woody encroachment is often the result of fire suppression, but it may also be related to changes in resource availability associated with global environmental change. We tested the relative strength of three important global change factors (CO(2) enrichment, nitrogen deposition, and loss of herbaceous plant diversity) on the first 3 years of bur oak (Quercus macrocarpa) seedling performance in a field experiment in central Minnesota, USA.

Soil microbes drive the classic plant diversity-productivity pattern.

Ecosystem productivity commonly increases asymptotically with plant species diversity, and determining the mechanisms responsible for this well-known pattern is essential to predict potential changes in ecosystem productivity with ongoing species loss. Previous studies attributed the asymptotic diversity-productivity pattern to plant competition and differential resource use (e.g.

Above- and belowground interactions drive habitat segregation between two cryptic species of tropical trees.

In the lowlands of central Panama, the Neotropical pioneer tree Trema micrantha (sensu lato) exists as two cryptic species: "landslide" Trema is restricted to landslides and road embankments, while "gap" Trema occurs mostly in treefall gaps. In this study, we explored the relative contributions of biotic interactions and physical factors to habitat segregation in T. micrantha.