There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Abstract
A growing body of empirical work suggests that soil organisms can exert a strong role
in plant community dynamics and may contribute to the coexistence of plant species.
Some of this evidence comes from examining the feedback on plant growth through changes
in the composition of the soil community. Host specific changes in soil community
composition can generate feedback on plant growth and this feedback can be positive
or negative. Previous work has demonstrated that negative soil community feedback
can contribute to the coexistence of equivalent competitors. In this paper, I show
that negative soil community feedback can also contribute to the coexistence of strong
competitors, maintaining plant species that would not coexist in the absence of soil
community dynamics. I review the evidence for soil community feedback and find accumulating
evidence that soil community feedback can be common, strongly negative, and generated
by a variety of complementary soil microbial mechanisms, including host-specific changes
in the composition of the rhizosphere bacteria, nematodes, pathogenic fungi, and mycorrhizal
fungi. Finally, I suggest topics needing further examination.