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Title
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Unravelling the role of soil properties as predictors of local- and global-scale grassland productivity and soil microbial community composition patterns
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Author
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Abstract
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| Plants and soil microorganisms are the main components of every terrestrial ecosystem. They drive the cycle of carbon in nature and they form complex, often species-specific interactions with each other shaping both aboveground and belowground communities. Soil is a medium that connects these two worlds and mediates all interactions between them. This work explores the role of soil abiotic properties in predicting plant productivity and microbial (bacterial and fungal) community composition patterns in grassland soils worldwide and the role of plant-soil interactions on the development of soil fungal community composition in heathlands. Our findings demonstrate that soil properties determining soil fertility and nutrient availability (soil organic matter, cation exchange capacity, percentage of sand, soil Zn concentrations) can explain a substantial amount of variation in global grassland productivity which surpasses the predictive power of commonly used climatic predictors. These same properties are also shown to be the best predictors of the local-scale variation in plant productivity across globally distributed grassland sites. Regarding soil microbes, we show that there is generality in predictors of microbial community composition along globally replicated, local-scale grassland productivity gradients (where abiotic factors such as pH and base saturation best predict bacterial community composition and plant communities best predict fungal community composition). Furthermore, we find that that different plant productivity levels are consistently associated with distinct soil microbial communities across different grassland sites. Finally, we demonstrate that plant-soil interactions are important factors determining fungal community assembly in heathlands, which can override the importance of abiotic soil conditions. These findings suggest that considering key soil physicochemical properties when predicting the effect of environmental changes on grassland productivity would not only improve grassland productivity models, but it could also help predict the shifts in soil microbial community composition. Moreover, given that some of the factors and interactions predicting both grassland plant productivity and microbial community composition were found to be universal across contrasting climates, similar general patterns might also hold in other systems. While this remains to be explored, the universal patterns observed in this study provide confidence that making global predictions regarding future changes in plant productivity, soil microbial community composition and, possibly resulting changes in ecosystem functioning, is a feasible task. |
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Language
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English
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Publication
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Antwerp
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University of Antwerp, Faculty of Science, Department of Biology
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2020
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Volume/pages
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207 p.
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Note
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Vicca, Sara [Supervisor]
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Verbruggen, Erik [Supervisor]
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Full text (open access)
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