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Plant-soil feedbacks
Related publications
Kulmatiski A., K.H. Beard, J. Stevens, and S.M. Cobbold. 2008. Plant-soil feedbacks:a meta-analytical review. Ecology Letters. 11(9):980-992
Aaronson, J.* Kulmatiski A., Norton, J. What do differences in microbial community composition tell us about plant soil feedback? Biology
Forero LE*, Kulmatiski A, Grenzer J*, Norton J. Plant-soil feedbacks help explain biodiversity-productivity relationships. Nature Communications Biology 4(1), 1-8.
Grenzer J*, Kulmatiski A, Forero LE*, Ebeling A, Eisenhauer N, Norton J. Moderate plant-soil feedbacks have small effects on the biodiversity-productivity relationship: a field experiment. Ecology and Evolution 11(17), 11651-11663.
Forero, L*., Grenzer, J.*, Heinze J., Schittko C., Kulmatiski A. Greenhouse- and field-measured plant-soil feedbacks are not correlated. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.
Kulmatiski, A., 2019. Plant-soil feedbacks predict native but not non-native plant community composition: a seven-year common-garden experiment. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 7, p.326.
Project type
No ongoing projects. I ran these experiments from 2000 to 2018 with support from NSF, USDA, and the Utah Agricultural Experiment Station.
Plant-soil feedbacks describe how plants change soil biology, chemistry, and structure in ways that affect concurrent or subsequent growth of individuals of the same or other species. These feedbacks often cause roughly 20% changes in aboveground biomass. This is sometimes enough to change competitive outcomes among species. We still have a lot to learn about how plants interact with soils, but it still remains difficult to understand how the plants interact with the billions of organisms in the soil.
There is a lot of potential in designing and maintaining plant communities by manipulating plant-soil interactions. Farmers are, for example, beginning to use bacterial inoculations to improve crop growth. There remains a lot of potential for this direction of research.
My lab has conducted massive plant-soil feedback experiments in Washington State, Minnesota, and Germany. Our current common garden research is plant-soil feedback related but doesn't use classic two-phase experimental approaches. We do not currently have plant-soil feedback experiments running, but we are likely to do more in the future.
