Soil microbes mediate the effects of resource variability on plant invasion.
Ecology
; 104(10): e4154, 2023 10.
Article
en En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-37611168
ABSTRACT
A fundamental question in ecology is which species will prevail over others amid changes in both environmental mean conditions and their variability. Although the widely accepted fluctuating resource hypothesis predicts that increases in mean resource availability and variability therein will promote nonnative plant invasion, it remains unclear to what extent these effects might be mediated by soil microbes. We grew eight invasive nonnative plant species as target plants in pot-mesocosms planted with five different synthetic native communities as competitors, and assigned them to eight combinations of two nutrient-fluctuation (constant vs. pulsed), two nutrient-availability (low vs. high) and two soil-microbe (living vs. sterilized) treatments. We found that when plants grew in sterilized soil, nutrient fluctuation promoted the dominance of nonnative plants under overall low nutrient availability, whereas the nutrient fluctuation had minimal effect under high nutrient availability. In contrast, when plants grew in living soil, nutrient fluctuation promoted the dominance of nonnative plants under high nutrient availability rather than under low nutrient availability. Analysis of the soil microbial community suggests that this might reflect that nutrient fluctuation strongly increased the relative abundance of the most dominant pathogenic fungal family or genus under high nutrient availability, while decreasing it under low nutrient availability. Our findings are the first to indicate that besides its direct effect, environmental variability could also indirectly affect plant invasion via changes in soil microbial communities.
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Texto completo:
1
Base de datos:
MEDLINE
Asunto principal:
Suelo
/
Microbiota
Tipo de estudio:
Prognostic_studies
Idioma:
En
Revista:
Ecology
Año:
2023
Tipo del documento:
Article