Relating belowground microbial composition to the taxonomic, phylogenetic, and functional trait distributions of trees in a tropical forest

“…However, they are in contrast to recent studies that did not find significant relationships between the local distribution of plant traits and soil microbial community composition within Panamanian tropical forest (Barber an et al, 2015) or in grassland sites in England (Fry et al, 2017;Leff et al, 2018). This likely relates to the different spatial scale used in these studies; our study considers variation in microbial communities at a regional scale, whereas the studies of Barber an et al (2015), Fry et al (2017) and Leff et al (2018) examined local scales where variation in both plant traits and microbial communities, and their drivers, is less and thus shows weaker patterns of association.…”

“…However, plant community phylogenetic structure was not significantly related to the composition of any of the soil taxonomic groups ( P > 0.3 in all cases), suggesting that phylogenetic relatedness is not predictive of soil community composition. This finding is in agreement with the monoculture mesocosm study described above and a field study conducted in a tropical rainforest that failed to find a strong effect of tree species phylogenetic relationships on soil communities (Barberán et al, 2015b). Furthermore, differences in community-aggregated trait values, including leaf and root N and C content, also did not significantly relate to the composition of any of the soil taxonomic groups ( P > 0.1 in all cases).…”

“…Our study was in line with Barberan et al. (2015), suggesting that the composition of soil bacterial communities can be less influenced by plant phylogeny. One potential explanation for this phenomenon is a more direct physical and chemical interaction between plants and fungi than what occurs with bacteria (Urbanová et al., 2015).…”