Abstract
Plants can strongly influence the performance of subsequent conspecific and heterospecific plants either positively or negatively by conditioning soil abiotic and/or biotic properties via plant litter and root activity. This process is commonly known as ‘plant-soil feedback’, which has been increasingly demonstrated to play a major role in plant community dynamics, ecosystem succession, and the maintenance of biodiversity (e.g., Bever et al. 1997; Ehrenfeld et al. 2005; Kulmatiski et al. 2008; van der Putten et al. 2013). As such, plant-soil feedback effects have major consequences for ecosystem functioning and application potential in areas such as the prediction of vegetation and ecosystem responses to global change, construction/maintenance of sustainable agroecosystems, ecosystem restoration, invasive plant management, and conservation of plant diversity. However, while recent plant-soil feedback studies have emerged aiming to explain underlying mechanisms, our understanding of plant-soil feedback and our ability to determine its relative importance in realistic settings remain limited by inconsistent experimental evidence (e.g., De Long et al. 2019; Gundale and Kardol 2021). Moreover, closely-associated ecological concepts such as priority effects, maternal effects, soil legacy effects, the Janzen–Connell hypothesis, and self-DNA inhibition tend to be considered separately, and recognising overlaps among these concepts can expand our understanding of plant-soil feedback (De Long et al. 2023). Thus, in an attempt to advance our understanding as well as shape novel perspectives to advance this key ecological concept, we gathered 14 articles for this Special Issue, which includes a selection of review, opinion, methods, modelling, and research papers
