Shift in competitive ability mediated by soil biota in an invasive plant

This dataset contains data from a greenhouse experiment described in the paper: Huang F, Huang Q, Gan X, Zhang W, Guo Y and Huang Y. (2021) Shift in competitive ability mediated by soil biota in an invasive plant. Ecology and Evolution, DOI: 10.1002/ece3.8287.

This experiment investigated the interactive effects of competition environment and soil biota on competitive ability of an invasive plant Mikania micrantha. The experimental design contained a combination of three factors: soil treatment (live soil vs. sterilized soil), competition treatment (grown in isolation, with intraspecific competitors and interspecific competitors) and soil source (from three invaded sites), on the growth and competitive performance of seven M. micrantha populations varying in their field conspecific and heterospecific abundance.

The main results of this experiment are that, with increasing conspecific abundance and decreasing heterospecific abundance, (1) M. micrantha increased intraspecific competition tolerance and intra- vs. interspecific competitive ability, but decreased interspecific competition tolerance; (2) M. micrantha increased tolerance of negative soil biota effect; (3) interspecific competition tolerance of M. micrantha was increasingly suppressed by the presence of soil biota, but intraspecific competition tolerance was less affected.

Methods
This dataset was collected during a greenhouse study at Guangdong Academy of Forestry, China and has been processed with a series of linear mixed models to produce a manuscript accepted for publication in Ecology and Evolution.