Plant-soil feedbacks promote negative frequency dependence in the coexistence of two aridland grasses.

ABSTRACT: Understanding the mechanisms of species coexistence is key to predicting patterns of species diversity. Historically, the ecological paradigm has been that species coexist by partitioning resources: as a species increases in abundance, self-limitation kicks in, because species-specific resources decline. However, determining coexistence mechanisms has been a particular puzzle for sedentary organisms with high overlap in their resource requirements, such as plants. Recent evidence suggests that plant-associated microbes could generate the stabilizing self-limitation (negative frequency dependence) that is required for species coexistence. Here, we test the key assumption that plant-microbe feedbacks cause such self-limitation. We used competition experiments and modelling to evaluate how tw

SUBMITTER: Chung YA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4971199 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature