Plant–Soil Feedbacks & Tropical Diversity
How do belowground interactions between plants and soil microbes maintain the extraordinary diversity of tropical forests? This research thread, rooted in my time at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, examines how mutualist and pathogen fungi mediate conspecific negative density dependence (CNDD) — a key mechanism thought to promote species coexistence.
A co-authored paper in Nature Communications showed that the interaction between mutualist and pathogen traits shapes plant community structure, while work in Ecology (top 10% most viewed) demonstrated that fungal community dissimilarity predicts plant–soil feedback strength. A review in PLOS Biology outlined how natural experiments and long-term monitoring are critical for understanding marine host–microbe ecology.
Looking ahead, I am interested in how phosphorus as a limiting nutrient may be a key to understanding tropical diversity — bridging this work back to my phosphorus cycling research.
