As the diversity of plants increases in an ecosystem, so does resource competition for soil nutrients, a process that mycorrhizal fungi can mediate. The influence of mycorrhizal fungi on plant biodiversity likely depends on the strength of the symbiosis between the plant and fungi, the differential plant growth responses to mycorrhizal inoculation, and the transfer rate of nutrients from the fungus to plant. However, our current understanding of how nutrient-plant-mycorrhizal interactions influence plant coexistence is conceptual and thus lacks a unified quantitative framework. To quantify the conditions of plant coexistence mediated by mycorrhizal fungi, we developed a mechanistic resource competition model that explicitly included plant-mycorrhizal symbioses. We found that plant-mycorrhizal interactions shape plant coexistence patterns by creating a tradeoff in resource competition. Especially, a tradeoff in resource competition was caused by differential payback in the carbon resources that plants invested in the fungal symbiosis and/or by the stoichiometric constraints on plants that required additional, less-beneficial, resources to sustain growth. Our results suggested that resource availability and the variation in plant-mycorrhizal interactions act in concert to drive plant coexistence patterns. Applying our framework, future empirical studies should investigate plant-mycorrhizal interactions under multiple levels of resource availability.

No abstract

Rather than spatial means of biomass, observed overlap in the intermittent spatial distributions of aquatic predators and prey is known to be more important for determining the flow of nutrients and energy up the food chain. A few previous studies have separately suggested that such intermittency enhances phytoplankton growth and trophic transfer to sustain zooplankton and ultimately fisheries. Recent observations have revealed that phytoplankton distributions display consistently high degrees of mm scale patchiness, increasing along a gradient from estuarine to open ocean waters. Using a generalized framework of plankton ecosystem models with different trophic configurations, each accounting for this intermittency, we show that it consistently enhances trophic transfer efficiency (TE), i.e. the transfer of energy up the food chain, and expands the model stability domain. Our results provide a new explanation for observation-based estimates of unexpectedly high TE in the vast oligotrophic ocean and suggest that by enhancing the viable trait space, micro-scale variability may potentially sustain plankton biodiversity.

We develop moment closure approximations to represent micro-scale spatial variability in the concentrations of nutrients (N), phytoplankton (P) and zooplankton (Z) in an NPZ model, which we apply to examine the impact of different levels of micro-scale variability on both ecosystem dynamics and trophic transfer. Accounting explicitly for both the mean-field and fluctuating components of each prognostic variable in the NPZ model yields different dynamics for the mean-field concentrations, as well as lower phytoplankton biomass and greater zooplankton biomass, compared to the conventional NPZ model without micro-scale variability. The biomass of zooplankton consistently increases with increasing total micro-scale variability, and a minimum threshold of such variability is required for the existence of stable steady state solutions in the NPZ closure model. Compared to the conventional NPZ model, the domain of parameter space over which stable solutions exist is larger than for the NPZ closure model, and this stable domain widens with increasing total variability. The latter result suggests that natural systems with greater micro-scale variability may have the potential to sustain greater biodiversity. We find that with the NPZ closure model: (1) the stability domains increases with micro-scale variability, (2) increase of the level of total micro-scale variability enhances trophic transfer, i.e. increases the biomass of zooplankton, and (3) the coefficient of variation (CV) of phytoplankton increases with micro-scale variability.