@article{a23b006528424e3aa05c9bbb844d73a2,
title = "Soil microbes generate stronger fitness differences than stabilization among California annual plants",
abstract = "Soil microorganisms influence a variety of processes in plant communities. Many theoretical and empirical studies have shown that dynamic feedbacks between plants and soil microbes can stabilize plant coexistence by generating negative frequencydependent plant population dynamics. However, inferring the net effects of soil microbes on plant coexistence requires also quantifying the degree to which they provide one species an average fitness advantage, an effect that has received little empirical attention. We conducted a greenhouse study to quantify microbially mediated stabilization and fitness differences among 15 pairs of annual plants that co-occur in southern California grasslands. We found that although soil microbes frequently generate negative frequencydependent dynamics that stabilize plant interactions, they simultaneously generate large average fitness differences between species. The net result is that if the plant species are otherwise competitively equivalent, the impact of plant-soil feedbacks is to often favor species exclusion over coexistence, a result that becomes evident only by quantifying the microbially mediated fitness difference. Our work highlights that comparing the stabilizing effects of plant-soil feedbacks to the fitness difference they generate is essential for understanding the influence of soil microbes on plant diversity.",
keywords = "Coexistence, Competition, Plant-microbe interactions, Plant-soil feedbacks, Rhizosphere, Soil biota",
author = "Kandlikar, {Gaurav S.} and Xinyi Yan and Levine, {Jonathan M.} and Kraft, {Nathan J.B.}",
note = "Funding Information: We acknowledge the Chumash peoples as the traditional land caretakers of the ecosystem studied in this project and the Gabrielino/Tongva peoples as the traditional land caretakers of Tovaangar (the Los Angeles basin and Southern Channel Islands), where the University of California, LosAngeles (UCLA), is located.We thankAnmolDhaliwal, Jonathan Shi, and the UCLA Plant Growth Facility staff for help with the greenhouse experiment and Kate McCurdy and other staff at Sedgwick Reserve for help in the field. For comments on early versions of the manuscript,we thank Priyanga Amarasekare, Madeline Cowen, Kenji Hayashi, Andy Kleinhesselink, Mary Van Dyke, and Marcel Vaz. We also thank three anonymous reviewers and editors J. Lau and J. Fox for comments that helped improve the manuscript. This work was performed in part at the University of California Natural Reserve System Sedgwick Reserve (https://doi.org/10.21973/N3C08R). This research was partially supported by the American Naturalist Society Student Research Award, the La Kretz Center for Conservation Science, and National Science Foundation (NSF)DEB-1644641 to N.J.B.K. and J.M.L. G.S.K. was supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (DGE-1650604) and by the UCLA Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; X.Y. was supported by the California Environmental DNA Summer Undergraduate Internship. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2020 by The University of Chicago.",
year = "2021",
month = jan,
doi = "10.1086/711662",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "197",
pages = "E30--E39",
journal = "American Naturalist",
issn = "0003-0147",
publisher = "University of Chicago",
number = "1",
}