Strong links between plant traits and microbial activities but different abiotic drivers in mountain grasslands

This dataset contains data and code that support the results in Weil,
S.-S., Martinez-Almoyna, C., Piton, G., Renaud, J., Boulangeat, L.,
Foulquier, A., ... & Thuiller, W. (2021) Strong links between
plant traits and microbial activities but different abiotic drivers in
mountain grasslands. Journal of Biogeography, 48(11), 2755-2770. We used
an extensive plant-soil dataset that covers 14 elevational gradients
(between 1500 and 2800 m of elevation) distributed over the whole
French Alps to analyse the spatial co-dependencies between the plant and
soil compartments. We ran a Graphical Lasso that extracts the direct and
indirect linkages between plant functional composition, soil microbial
activities, and environmental conditions (local climate and soil
properties). Our main results are 1) that plant traits are tightly
associated with microbial activities, the former being driven by climate
and the latter by soil properties; 2) that the dominance of specific plant
traits was more important than their diversity to determine plant-soil
linkages; and 3) that soil microbes invested strongly in nutrient
acquisition in sites with conservative plant traits and reduced organic
matter quality.