Plant species with ‘fast’ traits are winners in young and high‐diversity plant communities

作者：Christiane Roscher, Yanhao Feng, Nico Eisenhauer · 发表于：Journal of Ecology · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1111/1365-2745.70216 · 被引用次数：3 · 研究领域：Ecology and Vegetation Dynamics Studies、Plant and animal studies、Pasture and Agricultural Systems

Abstract Long‐term biodiversity experiments have shown increasing strengths of positive biodiversity–productivity relationships over time, while the species‐level responses to increased plant diversity are highly variable. Plant–soil interactions and resource‐use complementarity offer the potential to explain both overyielding and underyielding in diversity–productivity relationships. However, it is not well understood how community history, that is changing biotic interactions over time, modulates the growth of individual species and whether ‘winners’ (i.e. overyielding species) and ‘losers’ (i.e. underyielding species) differ in their traits. We first used above‐ground biomass data of 66 plant mixtures (with 2, 4, 8, 16 and 60 species) of a long‐term biodiversity experiment (Jena Experiment) to identify plot‐specific ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. Using a subset of two winner and two loser species from each mixture, we then planted individuals (= ‘phytometers’) in resident communities with different histories, that is 14‐year ‘old communities’ and ‘new communities’ on new soil, and measured their performance and traits related to the fast–slow leaf economic trait spectrum (leaf nitrogen, N Leaf , and specific leaf area, SLA). For both, species in the resident communities and the phytometers, we tested whether their assignment as winner or losers can be explained by their leaf economics. In the resident communities, plot‐specific winners had a greater SLA than losers, but only in h...