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Biodiversity

Plants on the web

Nature volume 396, pages 22–23 (1998)Cite this article

What are the mechanisms that determine species composition in plant communities? In a world in which biodiversity decreases daily, the question is self-evidently important. One factor known to be central to the performance of individual plants, their interactions with each other, and even the species composition of the community itself, is the activity of mycorrhizal fungi, which are symbiotically associated with the roots of most land plants1. Until now, however, most experiments designed to investigate these effects have employed either single2 or undefined mixtures3 of fungal species, so their causes remain unclear.

A breakthrough comes with the study of van der Heijden et al. on page 69of this issue4. Using field plots and mesocosms, the authors show first that the floristic diversity of two characteristically species-rich grasslands, one representative of calcareous habitats in Europe and the other of abandoned fields in North America, depends upon the presence of a species-rich assemblage of fungal symbionts in the soil. They then propose a mechanistic basis for the observed effect.

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Figure 1: Possible basis for the effects of fungal species richness upon plant biodiversity and production observed by van der Heijden et al. 4.

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, University of Sheffield, S10 2TN, Sheffield, UK

    David Read

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  1. David Read
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Read, D. Plants on the web. Nature 396, 22–23 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/23822

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