Phytometer experiment data from dBEF plots (2016-2017)

Long-term biodiversity experiments have shown that positive biodiversity-productivity relationships strengthen over time, while the species-level responses to increased plant diversity are highly variable. Plant-soil interactions and resource-use complementarity offer the potential to explain both, overyielding and underyielding in diversity-productivity relationships, but so far it is not well understood how community history modulates the growth of individual species and whether “losers” (i.e. underyielding species) and “winners” (i.e. overyielding species) share certain traits. Using a subset of two loser and two winner species identified for each mixture of the main experiment, we planted individuals (= “phytometers”) in communities with different history, i.e. 14-year “old communities” and “new communities” on old soil and on new soil, respectively, and measured their performance and functional traits.