Intransitivity in plant–soil feedbacks is rare but is associated with multispecies coexistence
Metadatos
Afficher la notice complèteAuteur
Pajares Murgó, Mariona; Garrido, José Luis; Perea, Antonio J.; López García, Álvaro; Bastida, Jesús M.; Prieto Rubio, Jorge; Lendínez, Sandra; Azcón Aguilar, Concepción; Alcántara, Julio M.Editorial
Wiley
Materia
Interaction networks Plant recruitment Soils Plants
Date
2024-03-19Referencia bibliográfica
Pajares-Murgó, M., Garrido, J.L., Perea, A.J., López-García, Á., Bastida, J.M., Prieto-Rubio, J. et al. (2024) Intransitivity in plant–soil feedbacks is rare but is associated with multispecies coexistence. Ecology Letters, 27, e14408. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.14408
Patrocinador
MCIU/PRE2019-089069/Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades; PGC2018-100966-B-I00/Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Agencia Estatal de Investigación and ERDFRésumé
Although plant–soil feedback (PSF) is being recognized as an important driver
of plant recruitment, our understanding of its role in species coexistence in
natural communities remains limited by the scarcity of experimental studies
on multispecies assemblages. Here, we experimentally estimated PSFs affecting
seedling recruitment in 10 co-occurring
Mediterranean woody species. We
estimated weak but significant species-specific
feedback. Pairwise PSFs impose
similarly strong fitness differences and stabilizing-destabilizing
forces, most
often impeding species coexistence. Moreover, a model of community dynamics
driven exclusively by PSFs suggests that few species would coexist stably, the
largest assemblage with no more than six species. Thus, PSFs alone do not suffice
to explain coexistence in the studied community. A topological analysis of all
subcommunities in the interaction network shows that full intransitivity (with all
species involved in an intransitive loop) would be rare but it would lead to species
coexistence through either stable or cyclic dynamics.