Community assembly and plant soil feedback
Assemblée des communautés et rétroaction entre le sol et les plantes
Résumé
My past research contributed to the improved understanding of biodiversity drivers and dynamics with a focus on mountain vegetation. This ecosystem is of particular interest due to its high biodiversity and small-scale heterogeneity. The complex topography of mountain regions determines sharp environmental gradients over short distances leading to a typical sequence of different vegetation stages and local adaptations of plant species. Climate and 6 land-use changes alter this stratification and require species to either acclimatize and adapt, migrate, or they will force species to local extinction. With the aim to better understand these dynamics my past research (after the PhD) was guided by the following research questions (chapter 2): (1) How to disentangle community assembly rules from diversity patterns? (2) How to predict invasion success from diversity patterns? Over the last years, I have increasingly realized that a simple focus on vegetation and the rules of plant community assembly is not enough to understand global change impacts. Plants respond directly to global changes, but also indirectly to the shifts that these global changes may exert on soil communities and on the functions of the soil ecosystem, notably nutrient and water supply. Inversely, plant communities influence soil communities, their decomposition activities, and soil fertility through the quantity and quality of their litter and their root exudates. These plant-soil feedbacks are key to understand and predict how global change effects will cascade through plant and soil compartments. To better understand these plant-soil feedbacks in mountain ecosystems my current and future research tries to find answers to the following research questions (chapter 3): (3) Do plant-soil feedbacks change over environmental gradients?
(4) How do plant-soil feedbacks respond to experimental warming and cooling?
(5) Do plant-soil feedbacks improve the performance of process-based vegetation models?
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