Speaker
Description
The widely observed positive relationship between plant diversity and ecosystem functioning is thought to be driven by complementary resource use of plant species. Biotic interactions among plants and between plants and soil organisms are suggested to drive key aspects of resource-use complementarity. The young tree diversity experiment MyDiv aims to integrate biotic interactions across guilds of organisms, more specifically between plants and mycorrhizal fungi, to explain resource-use complementarity in plants and its consequences for competition and multitrophic interactions. Our overarching hypothesis is that ecosystem functioning increases when more plant species associate with functionally dissimilar mycorrhizal fungi (arbuscular and ectomycorrhizal fungi). Here, we present an extract of results from the first nine years of MyDiv. We investigated tree mycorrhization with classical and novel techniques as well as different ecosystems functions ranging from tree productivity to herbivory and energy fluxes through food webs as affected by tree species richness and mycorrhizal type. The studies largely showed that tree species richness and identity effects dominate over mycorrhizal type effects in the early stage of the experiment. Furthermore, tree communities with two mycorrhizal types experienced rather additive effects that were in between that of arbuscular and ectomycorrhizal communities. We showed that plant communities differ in their preferred fungal communities. Overall, the results of the first nine years of the experimental platform reveal strengthening distinct mechanisms of the two mycorrhizal types with time driving life strategies of trees and biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationships.
| Status Group | Postdoctoral Researcher |
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