Journal
ECOLOGY
Volume 92, Issue 2, Pages 296-303Publisher
ECOLOGICAL SOC AMER
DOI: 10.1890/10-0773.1
Keywords
AMF; density dependence; diversity-productivity; negative feedback; pathogens; soil microbes; species richness
Categories
Funding
- DOE [DE-FG02-96ER62291]
- NSF LTER [DEB-0080382]
- NSF [DEB-0614406, 9977907]
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
- University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Research Growth Initiative
- Div Of Molecular and Cellular Bioscience
- Direct For Biological Sciences [9977907] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
Ask authors/readers for more resources
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., niche complementarity). Using an analytical model and a series of experiments, we demonstrate theoretically and empirically that host-specific soil microbes can be major determinants of the diversity-productivity relationship in grasslands. In the presence of soil microbes, plant disease decreased with increasing diversity, and productivity increased nearly 500%, primarily because of the strong effect of density-dependent disease on productivity at low diversity. Correspondingly, disease was higher in plants grown in conspecific-trained soils than heterospecific-trained soils (demonstrating host-specificity), and productivity increased and host-specific disease decreased with increasing community diversity, suggesting that disease was the primary cause of reduced productivity in species-poor treatments. In sterilized, microbe-free soils, the increase in productivity with increasing plant species number was markedly lower than the increase measured in the presence of soil microbes, suggesting that niche complementarity was a weaker determinant of the diversity-productivity relationship. Our results demonstrate that soil microbes play an integral role as determinants of the diversity-productivity relationship.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available