While the upward shift of plant species has been observed on many alpine and nival summits, the reaction of the subalpine and lower alpine plant communities to the current warming and lower snow precipitation has been little investigated so far. To this aim, 63 old, exhaustive plant inventories, distributed along a subalpine-alpine elevation gradient of the Swiss Alps and covering different pla...

Obligate aerobic AMF taxa have high species richness under waterlogged conditions, but their ecological role remains unclear. Here we focused on AM fungal mediation of plant interactions in a marshland plant community. Five cooccurring plant species were chosen for a neighbor removal experiment in which benomyl was used to suppress AMF colonization. A Phragmites australis removal experiment was...

BACKGROUND The redundancy hypothesis predicts that the species redundancy in a plant community enhances community stability. However, numerous studies in recent years questioned the positive correlation between redundancy and stability. METHODOLOGY We explored the relationship between the species redundancy, functional redundancy and community stability in typical steppe grassland in Northern...

Previous syntheses on the effects of environmental conditions on the outcome of plant-plant interactions summarize results from pairwise studies. However, the upscaling to the community-level of such studies is problematic because of the existence of multiple species assemblages and species-specific responses to both the environmental conditions and the presence of neighbors. We conducted the f...

In semi-arid ecosystems, vegetation is heterogeneously distributed, with plant species often associating in patches. These associations between species are not constant, but depend on the particular response of each species to environmental factors. Here, we investigated how plant species associations change in response to livestock grazing in a semi-arid ecosystem, Cabo de Gata-Níjar Natural P...

Plant roots are known to harbor large and diverse communities of bacteria. It has been suggested that plant identity can structure these root-associated communities, but few studies have specifically assessed how the composition of root microbiota varies within and between plant species growing under natural conditions. We assessed the community composition of endophytic and epiphytic bacteria ...

A growing body of research on plant-microbe interactions in soil is contributing to the development of a new, microbially based perspective on plant community ecology. Soil-dwelling microorganisms are diverse, and interactions with plants vary with respect to specificity, environmental heterogeneity, and fitness impact. Two microbial processes that may exert key influences on plant community st...

Bacterial endophytes colonize the inner tissues of host plants through the roots or through discontinuities on the plant surface, including wounds and stomata. Little is known regarding a possible role of insects in acquiring and transmitting non-phytopathogenic microorganisms from plant to plant, especially those endophytes that are beneficial symbionts providing plant protection properties an...

Inorganic fertilization and mowing alter soil factors with subsequent effects-direct and indirect - on above- and below-ground communities. We explored direct and indirect effects of long-term fertilization (N, P, NPK, Liming) and twice yearly mowing on the plant, bacterial and fungal communities and soil factors. We analyzed co-variation using 16S and 18S rRNA genes surveys, and plant frequenc...

Adverse growth conditions can lead to decreased plant growth, productivity, and survival, resulting in poor yields or failure of crops and biofeedstocks. In some cases, the microbial community associated with plants has been shown to alleviate plant stress and increase plant growth under suboptimal growing conditions. A systematic understanding of how the microbial community changes under these...