Department of Environmental Studies, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, USA.
Department of Ecology and Evolution, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York, USA.
Ecol Lett. 2024 Sep;27(9):e14503. doi: 10.1111/ele.14503.
Plant-soil feedback (PSF), the reciprocal interaction between plants and their soil environment, is a fundamental ecological process that can influence coexistence and functional structure in plant communities. Current theory establishes that PSF may enhance diversity or lead to exclusion depending on whether soil conditioning disproportionately benefits heterospecific or conspecific individuals. However, a more complete picture of the impact of PSF requires understanding how PSF interacts with competition. To that end, here we propose an integrated mathematical model combining trait-based competition and soil-explicit PSF. Contrary to the current paradigm, we find that soil conditioning that disproportionately favours conspecific individuals can promote coexistence. Additionally, we show that priority effects are common when soil-conditioning species differ in their edaphic preferences. These effects can allow species with large differences in competitive ability to coexist under certain soil conditions. Our results provide testable predictions tying community-level functional patterns in plant communities to PSF and competition.
植物-土壤反馈（PSF）是植物与其土壤环境之间的相互作用，是影响植物群落共存和功能结构的基本生态过程。目前的理论认为，PSF 可能会增加多样性，也可能导致排斥，具体取决于土壤调节是否不成比例地有利于异种种群或同种种群个体。然而，要更全面地了解 PSF 的影响，需要了解 PSF 如何与竞争相互作用。为此，我们在这里提出了一个结合基于特征的竞争和土壤显式 PSF 的综合数学模型。与当前的范式相反，我们发现，不成比例地有利于同种种群个体的土壤调节可以促进共存。此外，我们还表明，当调节土壤的物种在土壤偏好上存在差异时，优先效应很常见。这些效应可以使竞争能力差异很大的物种在某些土壤条件下共存。我们的研究结果为将植物群落的群落水平功能模式与 PSF 和竞争联系起来提供了可检验的预测。
