The trait-based approach shows that plant functional diversity strongly affects ecosystem properties. However, few empirical studies show the relationship between soil fungal diversity and plant functional diversity in natural ecosystems. We investigated soil fungal diversity along a restoration gradient of sandy grassland (mobile dune, semifixed dune, fixed dune, and grassland) in Horqin Sand ...

Higher plant diversity is often associated with higher soil microbial biomass and diversity, which is assumed to be partly due to elevated root exudate diversity. However, there is little experimental evidence that diversity of root exudates shapes soil microbial communities. We tested whether higher root exudate diversity enhances soil microbial biomass and diversity in a plant diversity gradi...

Plant diversity experiments generally find that increased diversity causes increased productivity; however, primary productivity is typically measured in the presence of a diverse food web, including pathogens, mutualists and herbivores. If food web impacts on productivity vary with plant diversity, as predicted by both theoretical and empirical studies, estimates of the effect of plant diversi...

Advances in DNA sequencing and synthesis technologies in the twenty-first century are now making it possible to build large-scale pipelines for engineering plant natural product pathways into heterologous production species using synthetic biology approaches. The ability to decode the chemical potential of plants by sequencing their transcriptomes and/or genomes and to then use this information...

Plant-pollinator coextinctions are likely to become more frequent as habitat alteration and climate change continue to threaten pollinators. The consequences of the resulting collapse of plant communities will depend partly on how quickly plant functional and phylogenetic diversity decline following pollinator extinctions. We investigated the functional and phylogenetic consequences of pollinat...

There is considerable evidence that both plant diversity and plant identity can influence the level of predation and predator abundance aboveground. However, how the level of predation in the soil and the abundance of predatory soil fauna are related to plant diversity and identity remains largely unknown. In a biodiversity field experiment, we examined the effects of plant diversity and identi...

Pathogens are thought to promote diversity in plant communities by preventing competitive exclusion. Previous studies have focussed primarily on single-plant, single-pathogen interactions, yet the interactions between multiple pathogens and multiple hosts may have non-additive impacts on plant community composition. Here, we report that both a bacterial and a fungal pathogen maintained the dive...

BACKGROUND The diversity of plants and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) has been experimentally shown to alter plant and AMF productivity. However, little is known about how plant and AMF diversity interact to shape their respective productivity. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS We co-manipulated the diversity of both AMF and plant communities in two greenhouse studies to determine whether th...

Flowering plants display spectacular floral diversity and a bewildering array of reproductive adaptations that promote mating, particularly outbreeding. A striking feature of this diversity is that related species often differ in pollination and mating systems, and intraspecific variation in sexual traits is not unusual, especially among herbaceous plants. This variation provides opportunities ...