Intransitivity in plant–soil feedbacks is rare but is associated with multispecies coexistence 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. Interaction networks Plant recruitment Soils Plants 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. 2024-05-28T11:06:45Z 2024-05-28T11:06:45Z 2024-03-19 info:eu-repo/semantics/article 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 https://hdl.handle.net/10481/92159 10.1111/ele.14408 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internacional Wiley