Phylogenetic conservatism in plant‐soil feedback and its implications for plant abundance

Abstract

We examined whether plant-soil feedback and plant-field abundance were phylogenetically conserved. For 57 co-occurring native and exotic plant species from an old field in Canada, we collected a data set on the effects of three soil biota treatments on plant growth: net whole-soil feedback (combined effects of mutualists and antagonists), feedback with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) collected from soils of conspecific plants, and feedback with Glomus etunicatum, a dominant mycorrhizal fungus. We found phylogenetic signal in both net whole-soil feedback and feedback with AMF of conspecifics; conservatism was especially strong among native plants but absent among exotics. The abundance of plants in the field was also conserved, a pattern underlain by shared plant responses to soil biota. We conclude that soil biota influence the abundance of close plant relatives in nature.

Advances in restoration ecology: rising to the challenges of the coming decades

“…The few plant-soil feedback experiments in a restoration context suggest that restoration of a soil community may be crucial for establishing late successional plant communities (e.g., De Deyn et al 2003, Kardol et al 2006, Middleton and Bever 2012 although success is not always observed (Kardol et al 2009). Much remains to be learnt about where feedbacks are likely to affect restoration success, including how closely related plants may be affected by soil biota (Anacker et al 2014).…”

Spatial analysis of phylogenetic community structure: New version of a classical method

“…Hence, while the effects of negative plant-soil feedback on the spatial structure of individual plants depend on the intensity of the underlying density-dependent mechanisms (Bagchi et al 2010), its ubiquitous presence suggests that plant-soil feedback may play an important role in the maintenance of plant diversity in natural (cm) communities (Mazzoleni et al 2015b). In a review on direct evidences on conspecific negative plant-soil feedback from both terrestrial and aquatic plants, Mazzoleni et al (2007) reported 138 cases of conspecific negative plant-substrate interactions, 96 of which are associated with grassland species, including Erigeron canadensis, one species of Veronica and one species of Viola, thus reinforcing the hypothesis that plant-soil feedbacks may contribute to the disruption of shortrange phylogenetic clustering (see also Anacker et al 2014).…”

Range-expanding plant species and their belowground neighbours : digging into novel interactions

“…Phylogenetic distance has been successfully used as a measure of ecological (dis)similarity and as a predictor of biotic interaction outcomes in studies that included plant species from multiple families (Anacker et al 2014;Parker et al 2015). It is likely that ecological differences in such studies may be influenced by deeply conserved traits that vary between families and therefore are phylogenetically determined.…”

“…Plant-soil feedbacks on conspecifics vary with phylogenetic distance (Anacker et al 2014) and are affected by plant origin (Klironomos 2002) when phylogenetically diverse plant species were examined. However, it remains unknown if these explanatory variables also predict plant soil feedback differences between closely related plant species.…”

“…Therefore, conspecific plant-soil feedback as a whole may, at least in part be phylogenetically determined. While plant-soil feedback differences among taxonomically diverse plant species might be explained by phylogeny (Anacker et al 2014), very few -if any-studies have tested whether closely related congeneric species, such as sister species, have a more similar pattern of plant-soil feedback than distantly related congeneric species. Likewise, only few studies have studied the whole rhizosphere microbiome including nematodes among plant species (Leff et al 2018), while differences of only distinct parts of the microbiome were compared between congeneric plant species (Bouffaud et al 2014;Schlaeppi et al 2014).…”