1
|
Pajares-Murgó M, Garrido JL, Perea AJ, López-García Á, Bastida JM, Prieto-Rubio J, Lendínez S, Azcón-Aguilar C, Alcántara JM. Intransitivity in plant-soil feedbacks is rare but is associated with multispecies coexistence. Ecol Lett 2024; 27:e14408. [PMID: 38504459 DOI: 10.1111/ele.14408] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/17/2023] [Revised: 01/16/2024] [Accepted: 02/28/2024] [Indexed: 03/21/2024]
Abstract
Although plant-soil feedback (PSF) is being recognized as an important driver of plant recruitment, our understanding of its role in species coexistence in natural communities remains limited by the scarcity of experimental studies on multispecies assemblages. Here, we experimentally estimated PSFs affecting seedling recruitment in 10 co-occurring Mediterranean woody species. We estimated weak but significant species-specific feedback. Pairwise PSFs impose similarly strong fitness differences and stabilizing-destabilizing forces, most often impeding species coexistence. Moreover, a model of community dynamics driven exclusively by PSFs suggests that few species would coexist stably, the largest assemblage with no more than six species. Thus, PSFs alone do not suffice to explain coexistence in the studied community. A topological analysis of all subcommunities in the interaction network shows that full intransitivity (with all species involved in an intransitive loop) would be rare but it would lead to species coexistence through either stable or cyclic dynamics.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Mariona Pajares-Murgó
- Department of Biología Animal, Biología Vegetal y Ecología, Universidad de Jaén, Jaen, Spain
- Institute Interuniversitario de Investigación del Sistema Tierra en Andalucía (IISTA), Granada, Spain
| | - José L Garrido
- Department of Microbiología del Suelo y la Planta, Estación Experimental del Zaidín (EEZ), CSIC, Granada, Spain
- Department of Ecología Evolutiva, Estación Biológica de Doñana (EBD), CSIC, Sevilla, Spain
| | - Antonio J Perea
- Department of Biología Animal, Biología Vegetal y Ecología, Universidad de Jaén, Jaen, Spain
- Institute Interuniversitario de Investigación del Sistema Tierra en Andalucía (IISTA), Granada, Spain
| | - Álvaro López-García
- Department of Biología Animal, Biología Vegetal y Ecología, Universidad de Jaén, Jaen, Spain
- Institute Interuniversitario de Investigación del Sistema Tierra en Andalucía (IISTA), Granada, Spain
- Department of Microbiología del Suelo y la Planta, Estación Experimental del Zaidín (EEZ), CSIC, Granada, Spain
| | - Jesús M Bastida
- Department of Microbiología del Suelo y la Planta, Estación Experimental del Zaidín (EEZ), CSIC, Granada, Spain
| | - Jorge Prieto-Rubio
- Department of Microbiología del Suelo y la Planta, Estación Experimental del Zaidín (EEZ), CSIC, Granada, Spain
| | - Sandra Lendínez
- Department of Microbiología del Suelo y la Planta, Estación Experimental del Zaidín (EEZ), CSIC, Granada, Spain
| | - Concepción Azcón-Aguilar
- Department of Microbiología del Suelo y la Planta, Estación Experimental del Zaidín (EEZ), CSIC, Granada, Spain
| | - Julio M Alcántara
- Department of Biología Animal, Biología Vegetal y Ecología, Universidad de Jaén, Jaen, Spain
- Institute Interuniversitario de Investigación del Sistema Tierra en Andalucía (IISTA), Granada, Spain
| |
Collapse
|
2
|
Senthilnathan A, D'Andrea R. Niche theory for positive plant-soil feedbacks. Ecology 2023; 104:e3993. [PMID: 36788733 DOI: 10.1002/ecy.3993] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Submit a Manuscript] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/27/2022] [Revised: 01/11/2023] [Accepted: 01/12/2023] [Indexed: 02/16/2023]
Abstract
Interactions between plants and the soil are an important ecological process in terrestrial ecosystems as they affect plant community structure: when and where we find different plant species. Those interactions are typically thought of as one-directional: local soil conditions filter through dispersing species to produce a community of locally adapted plants. However, plants can modify local physicochemical soil conditions via their roots and associations with soil microbes. These may in turn affect the local fitness of other plants, making plant-soil interactions bidirectional. In order to understand how they differ from other ecological processes that structure plant communities, we need a theory connecting these individual-level plant-soil feedbacks to community-level patterns. Here, we build this theory with a mathematical model of plant community dynamics in which soil conditioning is explicitly modeled over time and depends on the density of the plants. We analyze this model to describe the long-term composition and spatial distribution of the plant community. Our main result is that positive plant-soil feedbacks will create clustering of species with similar soil preferences. The composition of these clusters is further influenced by niche width and conditioning strength. In contrast with competitive dynamics driven by niche overlap, only species belonging to the same cluster can maintain high relative abundance in the community. Spatial heterogeneity in the form of an environmental gradient generates patches, each representing a single cluster. However, such patchiness is disfavored when species differ in dispersal ability. We show that stronger dispersers cannot take over the habitat as long as an exogenous driver favors soil conditions that benefit the other species. If exogenous drivers supersede soil conditioning by plants, we retrieve classic habitat filtering, where species are selected based on their suitability to the local environment. Overall, we provide a novel mathematical model for positive plant-soil feedback that we use to describe the spatial patterns of plant abundance and traits related to soil preference and conditioning ability.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
| | - Rafael D'Andrea
- Department of Ecology and Evolution, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York, USA
| |
Collapse
|