Plant-soil feedbacks from 30-year family-specific soil cultures: phylogeny, soil chemistry and plant life stage.

ABSTRACT: Intraspecific negative feedback effects, where performance is reduced on soils conditioned by conspecifics, are widely documented in plant communities. However, interspecific feedbacks are less well studied, and their direction, strength, causes, and consequences are poorly understood. If more closely related species share pathogens, or have similar soil resource requirements, plants may perform better on soils conditioned by more distant phylogenetic relatives. There have been few empirical tests of this prediction across plant life stages, and none of which attempt to account for soil chemistry. Here, we test the utility of phylogeny for predicting soil feedback effects on plant survival and performance (germination, seedling survival, growth rate, biomass). We implement a full factorial

SUBMITTER: Mehrabi Z 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4475366 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature