The next frontier of plant-soil feedback research: unraveling context dependence across biotic and abiotic gradients

摘要

Question: Plant-soil feedback (PSF) has emerged as a ubiquitous phenomenon and a potentially important predictor of plant community structure and dynamics. However, the predictive power of PSF in field contexts is mixed, and ecologists do not yet understand its relative importance compared to other factors that structure communities. Further progress requires a more nuanced understanding of how PSF interacts with other biotic and abiotic factors. Environmental factors (e.g. natural enemies, moisture, light, nutrients) are known to affect plant interactions with soil and soil organisms, leading to an expectation of environmental context dependence in plant-soil feedback. Such context dependence could explain when PSF is expected to be an important driver of community dynamics, and under what conditions PSF is likely to be positive (destabilizing) vs negative (stabilizing).