Microbial α-diversity poorly predicts plant growth
Even if microbial α-diversity has been suggested to drive crucial
ecosystem functions including plant productivity and diversity (van der
Heijden et al. , 1998; Delgado-Baquerizo et al. , 2016;
Laforest-Lapointe et al. , 2017), here we found that microbial
richness and Shannon’s diversity are poor predictors of PSF. Plants
responded to specific OTUs (Fig. 2), or groups of microorganisms (Table
1), but not to community diversity per se. This, however, does not
completely rule out microbial α-diversity as a potentially important
component of PSF. If there exists concurrent variation in (1) the impact
of different plants on microbial diversity and (2) the response of these
different plants to such diversity, then non-neutral PSF are to be
expected. We found poor evidence for the latter in our study (Table 1).