Aims Crop rotations are key to conditioning the soil biotic community that underpins agricultural productivity. For instance, mustards and pearl millet have the potential to alter soil biota and suppress soil diseases prior to a cash crop. Here we explore the effects of various combinations of brown mustard and pearl millet rotational treatments on potato yield, soil and root associated biota. Methods Brown mustard (var. Calie...

Aim Understanding the mechanisms promoting resilience in plant communities is crucial in times of increasing disturbance and global environmental change. Here, we present the first meta‐analysis evaluating the relationship between functional diversity and resilience of plant communities. Specifically, we tested whether the resilience of plant communities is positively correlated with interspecific trait variation (following th...

Soil organic carbon (SOC) plays an essential role in mediating community structure and metabolic activities of belowground biota. Unraveling the evolution of belowground communities and their feedback mechanisms on SOC dynamics helps embed the ecology of soil microbiome into carbon cycling, which serves to improve biodiversity conservation and carbon management strategy under global change. Here, croplands with a SOC gradient...

Understanding factors that maintain ecosystem stability is critical in the face of environmental change. Experiments simulating species loss from grassland have shown that losing biodiversity decreases ecosystem stability. However, as the originally sown experimental communities with reduced biodiversity develop, plant evolutionary processes or the assembly of interacting soil organisms may allow ecosystems to increase stabili...

Soil microbes are known to be key drivers of several essential ecosystem processes such as nutrient cycling, plant productivity and the maintenance of plant species diversity. However, how plant species diversity and identity affect soil microbial diversity and community composition in the rhizosphere is largely unknown. We tested whether, over the course of 11 years, distinct soil bacterial communities developed under plant m...

Species extinctions from local communities negatively affect ecosystem functioning. Ecological mechanisms underlying these impacts are well studied, but the role of evolutionary processes is rarely assessed. Using a long‐term field experiment, we tested whether natural selection in plant communities increased biodiversity effects on productivity. We re‐assembled communities with 8‐year co‐selection history adjacent to communit...

Increasing frequency of extreme climatic events can disrupt ecosystem processes and destabilize ecosystem functioning. Biodiversity may dampen these negative effects of environmental perturbations to provide greater ecosystem stability. We assessed the effects of plant diversity on the resistance, recovery and stability of experimental grassland ecosystems in response to recurring summer drought over 7 yr. Plant biomass produc...

Plant species richness ( PSR ) increases nutrient uptake which depletes bioavailable nutrient pools in soil. No such relationship between plant uptake and availability in soil was found for phosphorus (P). We explored PSR effects on P mobilisation [phosphatase activity ( PA )] in soil. PA increased with PSR . The positive PSR effect was not solely due to an increase in C org concentrations because PSR remained significant if r...

There is a great interest in ecology in understanding the role of soil microbial diversity for plant productivity and coexistence. Recent research has shown increases in species richness of mutualistic soil fungi, the arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF), to be related to increases in aboveground productivity of plant communities. However, the impact of AMF richness on plant–plant interactions has not been determined. Moreover,...