Abstract
Purpose
Plants and soil microbes both influence how ecosystems respond to environmental change. Yet, we lack the ability to generalize how plants and soil microbes influence each other in the same or varying soil conditions. This limitation thwarts ecologists’ ability to understand and predict effects of environmental changes such as elevated anthropogenic nitrogen (N) deposition. Accordingly, we examined the specificity of plant species’ influence on soil microbial community composition.
Methods
We tested (1) whether congeneric grass species have unique effects on soil microbial communities, (2) how relative abundances of microbial taxa can be explained by Poa phylogeny, plant traits, and range-wide traits (annual temperature and soil pH), (3) whether N addition alters associations between Poa species and soil microbes, and (4) whether the magnitude of microbial community change in response to elevated N can be explained by plant growth responses to N. We conducted a greenhouse experiment with seven Poa species and native soils.
Results
We found that individual Poa species were associated with different soil fungal and bacterial assemblages. Differences in microbial composition were not attributable to Poa phylogeny, the plant traits we tested, nor range-wide species traits we tested. Nitrogen addition enhanced the unique effects of Poa species on fungal and bacterial community compositions.
Conclusion
These results demonstrate how ecological interactions of related plant species vary depending on resource supply, revealing important context dependency for accurately predicting microbially mediated nutrient cycling and ecosystem responses to changes in nutrient availability.
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Data availability
Data will be submitted to the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) public repository and sequences will be submitted to NCBI.
Code availability
Analyses were conducted using open access R packages and no novel coding approaches were used.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Noah Fierer, Katharine Suding, Nichole Barger, Eve-Lynn Hinkley and Jonathan Leff for insightful input throughout the study; Jessica Henley, Thomas Lemieux, Janice Harvey, Tim Hogan, Dina Clark, Ben Murphy, Matt Gebert, Holly Archer, Max Owens, Tyler Justice for help with the experiment and/or data collection; Tobin Hammer, Josh Grinath, Thea Whitman, and Richard Lankau for analysis suggestions. We thank Black Dog LED, Boulder, CO for donation of an LED light panel for this experiment, and the EBIO department’s graduate student Writing Co-op, and QDT for writing and analysis support. This research was funded by Beverly Sears Fund, John W. Marr Memorial Fund, the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program, and the EBIO Research Grant at the University Colorado.
Funding
Research was funded by the Colorado Native Plant Society’s John Marr Memorial Grant, and University of Colorado grants including the Beverly Sears Grant, EBIO research grants, and the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program.
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Potter, T.S., Anacker, B.L., Churchill, A.C. et al. Plant species’ influence on rhizosphere microbial communities depends on N availability. Plant Soil 491, 681–696 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11104-023-06148-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11104-023-06148-7