Time course of plant diversity effects on productivity, stability and assembly of communities and relation to plant-plant and plant-fungal leaf pathogen interactions

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Previous work demonstrated diversity effects on plant community productivity, stability and assembly. However, underlying mechanisms are still largely unknown. Therefore, we address such mechanisms based on the long time series of plant performance data provided by the Jena Experiment, on new experimental manipulations and on complementary data about aboveground plant–plant and plant– pathogen interactions. In work package 1, we will test whether complementarity increases over time in the main and dominance experiments. Furthermore, we will compare community dynamics without and with invasion (new split-plots in main experiment) to test how community stability is related to fluctuations in plant species abundances. In the new trait-based experiment we will test whether deliberately large trait differences maximize complementarity. In work package 2, we will derive and compare matrices of pair-wise plant interaction coefficients from the new glasshouse experiment and the main and dominance experiments. We will use these interaction matrices in Lotka-Volterra approaches to predict diversity effects in mixtures. In work package 3, we will use the invasion treatment to test whether community assembly under invasion leads to convergence of diversity and productivity of all communities, but different species composition of initially different communities. In conclusion, our subproject will further the understanding of mechanisms underlying diversity effects on productivity, stability and assembly of plant communities.