Experiments

Experiment 288 - Quantifying plant-soil feedback effects in classic diversity-productivity experiments

Plant productivity often increases with species diversity. Explaining how this happens remains a central problem in ecology. Recent conceptual and experimental evidence suggests that plant-soil feedbacks (PSFs) may be an important but overlooked factor that may help explain diversity-productivity (DP) relationships. The goal of the proposed research is to test whether or not PSF data can improve predictions of species coexistence and productivity in four long-term DP experiments located in the US and Europe.

To do this 1) greenhouse and field PSF experiments will be used to produce full-factorial PSF data for the species at each study site. This new PSF data will be used to parameterize several PSF models that will be used to predict plant coexistence and productivity in plant communities. By using short-term PSF experiments and leveraging data from existing long-term DP experiments, this approach will provide rapid, quantitative results with broad spatial and temporal inference.

Methods for e288

Datasets