OPUS: Microbial Dynamics and the Structure of Plant Communities

土壤微生物在植物健康中发挥着关键作用，这既是通过植物病原体的有害影响，也是通过与细菌和真菌互助者的联合增加获得基本土壤资源的有利影响。因此，植物种群的生存能力和繁殖成功取决于土壤群落的组成，而陆地植物生产力和群落组成的长期轨迹取决于土壤微生物群落的动态。实验操作表明，土壤微生物群落会随着当地植物寄主的变化而变化，这种变化往往会导致寄主性能的下降。例如，在农作物中，单一作物后微生物群落的变化导致产量下降，从而激发了轮作战略。最近的实验工作表明，这些相同的动态可以促进无管理植物群落中植物物种的更替和多样性的维持。虽然有强有力的证据证明这些过程，但这项工作尚未纳入对微生物动态驱动植物群落格局的长期潜力的全面理解。这项研究项目的目标是在一本专著中综合植物-微生物相互作用的生态学证据。这本专著将从植物病原体的致病力和植物互助者利益的稳定性的决定因素出发，建立一个预测微生物对植物动态的调节的框架。这一框架将允许预测植物群落组成随时间和跨环境扰动的变化。这个项目将产生一本专著，它将作为植物生态学日益增长的领域的综合，因此将对本科生和研究生的培训有用。该专著将推动关于植物-微生物相互作用及其后果的进一步工作，所开发的框架将有助于预测陆地群落对气候变化等人为干扰的反应。

Soil microbes play key roles in plant health, both through the detrimental effects of plant pathogens and the beneficial effects of increased access to essential soil resources through associations with bacterial and fungal mutualists. As a result the viability and reproductive success of plant populations depends upon the composition of the soil community and the long-term trajectory of terrestrial plant productivity and community composition depends upon the dynamics within the soil microbial community. Experimental manipulations have demonstrated that the soil microbial community changes with its local plant host and often this change leads to a decline in performance of that host. In agricultural crops, for example, the change in microbial community following mono-cropping leads to a yield decline, thereby motivating a strategy of crop rotation. Recent experimental work suggests that these same dynamics can contribute to the replacement of plant species and the maintenance of diversity in unmanaged plant communities. While there is strong evidence for these processes, this work has not been integrated into a comprehensive understanding of the long-term potential for microbial dynamics to drive plant community patterns. The goal of this research project is to synthesize the evidence on the ecology of plant-microbe interactions within a monograph. The monograph will build from the determinants of virulence in plant pathogens and of stability of benefits from plant mutualists toward a framework that predicts microbial mediation of plant dynamics. This framework will allow predictions of changes of plant community composition across time, and across environmental perturbations. This project will produce a monograph that will serve as a comprehensive synthesis of a growing area of plant ecology and will thereby be useful for undergraduate and graduate training. The monograph will motivate further work on the plant-microbe interactions and their consequences, and the framework developed will facilitate prediction of responses of terrestrial communities to anthropogenic disturbance, such as climate change.