Soil types select for plants with matching nutrient‐acquisition and ‐use traits in hyperdiverse and severely nutrient‐impoverished campos rupestres and cerrado in Central Brazil

1. Understanding the mechanisms that underlie the generation of beta-diversity remains a challenge in ecology. Underground plant adaptations to environmental gradients have received relatively little attention.
2. We studied plant nutrient-acquisition strategies and nutrient-use efficiency at three stages of pedogenesis in infertile soils from campos rupestres and on less infertile soil from cerrado sensu stricto in Brazil. All soils support very high plant diversity with high species turnover between soil types at small spatial scales (meters). We expected that differences in nutrient–acquisition and –use strategies would be associated with this high species turnover. With severely decreasing phosphorus (P) availability, we expected the effectiveness of arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) symbioses for plant P acquisition to decrease, and reliance on non-mycorrhizal strategies (NM) to increase, while maintaining efficient nutrient-use.
3. Concentrations of total soil P and nitrogen (N) were ...