Data from: Soil microbes mediate the effects of resource variability on plant invasion

Abstract

A fundamental question in ecology is which species will prevail over others amid changes in both environmental mean conditions and their variability. Although the widely accepted fluctuating resource hypothesis predicts that increases in mean resource availability and variability therein will promote non-native plant invasion, it remains unclear to what extent these effects might be mediated by soil microbes. We grew eight invasive non-native plant species as target plants in pot-mesocosms planted with five different synthetic native communities as competitors and assigned them to eight combinations of two nutrient-fluctuation (constant vs pulsed), two nutrient-availability (low vs high) and two soil-microbe (living vs sterilized) treatments. We found that when plants grew in sterilized soil, nutrient fluctuation promoted the dominance of non-native plants under overall low nutrient availability, whereas the nutrient fluctuation had minimal effect under high nutrient availability. In contrast, when plants grew in living soil, nutrient fluctuation promoted the dominance of non-native plants under high nutrient availability rather than under low nutrient availability. Analysis of the soil microbial community suggests that this might reflect that nutrient fluctuation strongly increased the relative abundance of the most dominant pathogenic fungal family or genus under high nutrient availability, while decreasing it under low nutrient availability. Our findings are the first to indicate that besides its direct effect, environmental variability could also indirectly affect plant invasion via changes in soil microbial communities.