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Development of negative soil feedback by an invasive plant near the northern limit of its invaded range

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Abstract

Invasions at high latitudes are recognized as an emerging threat to native biodiversity, but non-native plants still are scarce in northern Canada. One factor potentially inhibiting further invasions may be below-ground interactions; in particular, it is unclear whether interactions with soil biota are likely to help or hinder the spread of new species into often challenging northern soils. In the Canadian subarctic, the non-native plant Linaria vulgaris has invaded human-disturbed soils in the town of Churchill, Manitoba (58.8°N) but for decades has failed to spread into natural communities. One explanation for this stasis might be greater resistance by soil communities in uninvaded areas relative to areas where this plant is established; however, no local evidence for plant-soil feedbacks exists. In one of the first papers to test the potential role of plant-soil feedbacks in an invasion at high latitudes, we planted L. vulgaris in soil serially inoculated with live and sterilized field-collected soil sampled from invaded or uninvaded sites, and measured plant performance (biomass) over three iterations. We also conducted soil chemical analyses to determine whether pH, and carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorous contents differ between invaded and uninvaded areas. There was no initial difference in biomass between inoculation treatments in the first two iterations. However, by iteration 3, we found that sterilization significantly increased L. vulgaris biomass in invaded soils, indicating feedback becomes negative in invaded soils compared to uninvaded soils. Soil chemistry did not differ significantly between invaded and uninvaded soils, though there was a tendency for invaded soils to contain more carbon and nitrogen. These results do not support the hypothesis that L. vulgaris is absent from uncolonized sites because soil communities resist invasion. Instead, they provide evidence that L. vulgaris is inhibited by plant-soil feedbacks in invaded soils, while feedbacks in native-dominated soils are not a barrier to further local spread. Thus, explanations for the restriction of this species must lie elsewhere.

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Data availability

The datasets and code generated during the current study will be made publicly available on Dryad after the manuscript is accepted. The datasets and code are currently available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank LeeAnn Fishback and the science technicians at the Churchill Northern Studies Centre (CNSC) for collecting soil samples and shipping them to the University of Toronto Mississauga for our experiment, and the Koffler Scientific Reserve (KSR) for allowing seed collection. We would also like to thank Tim Duval and the Department of Geography, Geomatics and Environment (GGE) at UTM for letting us borrow their equipment for pH measurements, and Soham Raikar for assisting with lab work, especially biomass measurements.

Funding

This work was supported by an NSERC Discovery Grant to PMK (Grant number: RGPIN-2016–06095), and funding from the Northern Scientific Training Program, a Sigma Xi Grant-in-aid of Research, and an Ontario Graduate Scholarship to VMZ.

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  1. Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, University of Toronto Mississauga, 3359 Mississauga Road, Mississauga, ON, L5L 1C6, Canada

    Vicki M. Zhang & Peter M. Kotanen

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  1. Vicki M. Zhang
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection, and analyses were performed by V.M. Zhang. The first draft of the manuscript was written by V.M. Zhang, and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Vicki M. Zhang.

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Zhang, V.M., Kotanen, P.M. Development of negative soil feedback by an invasive plant near the northern limit of its invaded range. Plant Ecol 224, 635–645 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11258-023-01330-4

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