Invasive plants change soil life through their traits, not their numbers
Liu S, Sepp SK, Ah-Peng C, Paganeli B, Püssa K
Invasive Species
If you're battling an invasive vine or weed in your yard, this suggests the real threat to your soil isn't how much of it there is, but whether it brings a totally different growth form (like a tall broadleaf shrub) into a patch that was previously all low grasses.
Researchers on Réunion Island compared young lava-flow habitats and older rainforest to see how invasive plants affect the fungi and bacteria living in soil. Surprisingly, just having more invasive plant cover didn't change the soil microbes at all. What did matter was diversity in plant traits, like height and leaf size, meaning an invader that looks and grows very differently from its neighbors has a bigger ripple effect underground than one that blends in.
Key Findings
Non-native plant cover significantly altered plant species diversity, community composition, and functional traits (vegetative height, leaf area), with stronger effects in early-successional lava flow habitats than in mature rainforest
Non-native plant cover alone had no measurable effect on soil fungal or bacterial diversity or community composition
Functional diversity of the plant community (trait differences among species) explained variation in soil microbial community composition and co-occurrence network structure, making it a better predictor than plant cover alone
chevron_right Technical Summary
Scientists studying a volcanic island in the Indian Ocean found that when invasive plants move in, it's not how many invaders show up that changes the soil's fungi and bacteria, but how different those plants are from each other in size and leaf shape. This matters for predicting which invasions will disrupt soil life and which won't.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Functional Diversity of Plant Communities Explains the Response of Soil Microbes to Plant Invasion Along a Successional Gradient.
Ecosystems worldwide face growing impacts from non-native species invasions. However, little is known about how soil microbial communities respond to the addition of non-native plants, and whether ...
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