de Vries, F., J. Lau, C. Hawkes, and M. Semchenko. 2023. Plant-soil feedback under drought: does history shape the future? Trends in Ecology & Evolution 38:708-718.

Drought, which is increasing in intensity and frequency with climate change, can severely affect plant growth and alter vegetation dynamics.Plants modify microbial communities in their rhizosphere, which in turn affect plant productivity and local persistence, creating so-called plant?soil feedback (PSF).As droughts impact both plant and soil microbial attributes, PSF is likely to change under and following drought events, but limited experimental tests produce widely diverging results regarding the direction and magnitude of changes.Combined evidence from a range of related research fields suggests that PSF response to drought may be predicted by plant traits, the intensity of drought, and the drought histories of both plants and microbes.Explicit inclusion of coexistence history and the local adaptation of plants and soil microbes at local and regional scales will enable more realistic predictions about the contribution of plant?microbial associations to plant community response to climate change.

DOI: 10.1016/j.tree.2023.03.001

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