Plant species diversity, plant biomass and responses of the soil community on abandoned land across Europe: idiosyncracy or above-belowground time lags

By Katarina Hedlund, I. Regina, W. H. van der Putten, J. Lepš, T. Díaz, G. Korthals, S. Lavorel, V. Brown, Dagmar Gormsen, S. Mortimer and 5 more. 2003

213 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We examined the relationship between plant species diversity, productivity and the development of the soil community during early secondary succession on former arable land across Europe. We tested the hypothesis that increasing the initial plant species diversity enhances the biomass production and consequently stimulates soil microbial biomass and abundance of soil invertebrates. We performed five identical field experiments on abandoned arable land in five European countries (CZ, NL, SE, SP and UK) which allowed us to test our hypothesis in a range of climate, soil and other environmental factors that varied between the experimental sites. The initial plant diversity was altered by sowing seed mixtures of mid-successional grassland species with two or five grass species, one or five legumes and one or five forbs. The results of low and high sown diversity treatments were compared with plots that were naturally colonized by species present in the seed bank. In three out of the five field sites, there was no correlation between plant species number and plant biomass production, one site had a positive and the other a negative relation. Treatments with a high diversity seed mixture had a higher biomass than the naturally colonized plots. However, there was no significant difference between high and low sown diversity plots at four out of five sites. The three-year study did not give any evidence of a general bottom-up effect from increased plant biomass on biomass of bacteria, saprophytic fungi or abundance of microarthropods. The biomass of arbuscular mycorrhizal was negatively related to plant biomass. The abundance of nematodes increased after abandonment and was related to plant biomass at four sites. Our results support the hypothesis that plant species diversity may have idiosyncratic effects on soil communities, even though studies on a longer term could reveal time lags in the response to changes in composition and biomass production of plant communities.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nature and Landscape Conservation, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a3ec014cbeb0bf5f5a4df4a129b9cc3af97b14b0

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

In Soil Science

Citations in the corpus

Plant community impacts on the structure of earthworm communities depend on season and change with time. (2009, background): “Although some studies reported idiosyncratic impacts of plant diversity (Hedlund et al., 2003; Milcu et al., 2006), plant productivity was often reported to beneficially affect earthworm performance (Zaller and Arnone, 1999; Spehn et al.”
Resource Heterogeneity Moderates the Biodiversity-Function Relationship in Real World Ecosystems (2008, background): “ments are notoriously variable [19], with many studies also”
Relative contributions of plant traits and soil microbial properties to mountain grassland ecosystem services (2013, background): “…in plant diversity and community structure can have a cascade effect on soil micro-organisms and their functioning, again through altering the amount and quality of resources entering the soil (e.g. Hedlund et al. 2003; De Deyn et al. 2004; Eisenhauer et al. 2010; De Deyn, Quirk & Bardgett 2011a).”
Effects of plant diversity on plant biomass production and soil macrofauna in Amazonian pastures (2008, result): “These results are consistent with several previous studies (Hooper and Vitousek, 1997; Spehn et al., 2000b; Hedlund et al., 2003; Gastine et al., 2003b).”
Investigating microbial community structure in soils by physiological, biochemical and molecular fingerprinting methods (2006, background): “…et al. (2001) reported that plants had a very strong influence on soil microbial communities, whereas Kennedy et al. (2004) reported no significant effect of plants, and Gastine et al. (2003) and Hedlund et al. (2003) suggested inconsistent effects of both soil characteristics and plant types.”
Biotic plant–soil feedbacks across temporal scales (2013, background): “However, temporal changes in plant communities do not always translate directly to changes in soil biota (Hedlund et al. 2003), suggesting that plant–soil feedbacks are driven more by the plants than by the soil communities or that soil organisms respond more to external factors than to plants.”