Integrating spatial structure and interspecific and intraspecific plant–soil feedback effects and responses into community structure

Plant-soil feedbacks have important effects on plant communities, but most theory has been derived from experiments on intraspecific plant-soil feedbacks. Much less is known about how interspecific plant-soil feedbacks affect coexistence and plant communities, due in part to experimental and analytical challenges. Here, we propose a framework for evaluating plant-soil feedbacks among multiple interacting species that incorporates 1) the average effect each species has on conspecific and heterospecific neighbors via how they modify soil biota, 2) the average response of each species to the soil modifications made by neighboring species, and 3) intraspecific feedback. We refer to this as the “Effect-Response-Intraspecific” (ERI) model. We used individual-based models to evaluate the relative importance of intraspecific and interspecific soil feedback in determining species abundance ranks in simulated plant communities. To compare the heuristic value of the ERI model to that of an establi...