Aims The home-field advantage (HFA) hypothesis predicts faster decomposition of plant residues in home soil compared to soils with different plants ( away ), and has been demonstrated in forest and grassland ecosystems. It remains unclear if this legacy effect applies to crop residue decomposition in arable crop rotations. Such knowledge could improve our understanding of decomposition dynamics in arable soils and may allow op...

Recent demonstrations of the role of plant–soil biota interactions have challenged the conventional view that vegetation changes are mainly driven by changing abiotic conditions. However, while this concept has been validated under natural conditions, our understanding of the long‐term consequences of plant–soil interactions for above‐belowground community assembly is restricted to mathematical and conceptual model projections...

The importance of managing land to optimize carbon sequestration for climate change mitigation is widely recognized, with grasslands being identified as having the potential to sequester additional carbon. However, most soil carbon inventories only consider surface soils, and most large‐scale surveys group ecosystems into broad habitats without considering management intensity. Consequently, little is known about the quantity...

Soil biodiversity plays a key role in regulating the processes that underpin the delivery of ecosystem goods and services in terrestrial ecosystems. Agricultural intensification is known to change the diversity of individual groups of soil biota, but less is known about how intensification affects biodiversity of the soil food web as a whole, and whether or not these effects may be generalized across regions. We examined biodi...

The controls on aboveground community composition and diversity have been extensively studied, but our understanding of the drivers of belowground microbial communities is relatively lacking, despite their importance for ecosystem functioning. In this study, we fitted statistical models to explain landscape‐scale variation in soil microbial community composition using data from 180 sites covering a broad range of grassland typ...

Summary Microbial communities respond to a variety of environmental factors related to resources (e.g. plant and soil organic matter), habitat (e.g. soil characteristics) and predation (e.g. nematodes, protozoa and viruses). However, the relative contribution of these factors on microbial community composition is poorly understood. Here, we sampled soils from 30 chalk grassland fields located in three different chalk hill ridg...

Summer droughts are predicted to increase in severity and frequency in the United Kingdom, due to climate change. Few studies have addressed the impacts of drought on interactions between species, and the majority have focussed on increases in CO 2 concentration and changes in temperature. Here, the effect of experimental summer drought on the strength of the plant‐mediated interaction between leaf‐mining Stephensia brunnichel...

Despite decades of research, it remains controversial whether ecological communities converge towards a common structure determined by environmental conditions irrespective of assembly history. Here, we show experimentally that the answer depends on the level of community organization considered. In a 9‐year grassland experiment, we manipulated initial plant composition on abandoned arable land and subsequently allowed natural...