Integrating spatial structure and interspecific and intraspecific plant-soil feedback effects and responses into community structure.

Xiao, Atwater & Callaway

I’m pleased to announce the acceptance of a new paper in Oikos. In this paper, we propose a new heuristic framework for evaluating plant-soil-feedbacks, a process wherein individual plants exert intergenerational effects on the whole community by altering the soil. Most current models of plant-soil-feedbacks consider the interaction between only two species, and become hopelessly complex when more than a few species are modeled. Our heuristic framework simplifies multispecies feedbacks into three parameters: average soil-feedback-effect, average soil-feedback-response, and average strength of interspecific competition. This approach simplifies both how interspecific soil feedbacks are measured and modeled.