Project details

Collaborators

Songlin Fei (Purdue)
Stephanie Kivlin (UT Knoxville)
John Parker (SERC)
Melissa McCormack (SERC)
Grant Domke (USFS)

Research summary

It's often presumed that communities with high species richness at one trophic level will have high species richness at another trophic level, with the strongest relationships occurring between levels that interact strongly (e.g., mutualistic interactions). Thus, plant and mycorrhizal fungal diversity should be closely coupled. Data on coupled diversity patterns, however, are sparse—especially across spatial and temporal scales. For this project (funded by NSF), we are exploring diversity patterns (plants and mycorrhizal fungi) across multiple scales, and investigating the consequences for diversity couplings on ecosystem processes such as plant productivity and soil C storage.