Soil fungal networks maintain local dominance of ectomycorrhizal trees - Experimental Data

This data-set is the experimental data for the paper Liang et al. 2020 Nature Communications, entitled "Soil fungal networks maintain local dominance of ectomycorrhizal trees". It contains results on seedling growth and survival for two hyphal exclusion experiments in a subtropical forest. The data-set include four data files, entitled “Tree_Seedling_Survival.csv”, “Tree_Seedling_Growth.csv”, “Tree_Seedling_Root_Colonization.csv”, and “In-growth_Core_Enviroment.csv”, with metrics including survival status, height, total biomass and the biomass of component plant parts, percentage root colonisation by mycorrhizas, for tree seedlings of ten common species including five ectomycorrhizal (ECM) and five arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) species, which were transplanted in the in-growth cores with windows covering different sizes of nylon meshes (35 vs. 0.5 µm). The aim of the experiments was to test the prediction that differential access to root-associated fungal networks regulates plant-soil feedbacks, and quantify how access to root-associated fungal connections affects growth, fitness and pathogen loads of seedlings in patches of subtropical forest dominated by adult trees that associate with either ECM or AM fungi.