Purpose: Plants and soil microbes both influence how ecosystems respond to environmental change. Yet, we lack the ability to generalize how plants and soil microbes influence each other in the same or varying soil conditions. This limitation thwarts ecologists' ability to understand and predict effects of environmental changes such and elevated anthropogenic nitrogen (N) deposition. Accordingly, we examined the specificity of plant species' influence on soil microbial community composition.
Methods: We tested (1) whether congeneric grass species have unique effects on soil microbial communities, (2) how relative abundances of microbial taxa can be explained by Poa phylogeny, plant traits, and range-wide traits (annual temperature and soil pH), and (3) whether N addition alters associations between Poa species and soil microbes, and (4) whether the magnitude of microbial community change in response to elevated N can be explained by plant growth responses to N. We conducted a greenhouse experiment with seven Poa species and native soils.
Results: We found that individual Poa species were associated with different soil fungi but similar soil bacteria. Differences in microbial composition were not attributable to Poa phylogeny, plant traits, or range-wide traits. Nitrogen addition enhanced the unique effects of Poa species on fungal and bacterial community compositions.
Conclusion: These results demonstrate how ecological interactions of related plant species vary depending on resource supply, revealing important context dependency for accurately predicting microbially-mediated nutrient cycling and ecosystem responses to changes in nutrient availability.
Plants species' influence on rhizosphere microbial communities depends on N availability