Title:	Aboveground–Belowground Community Ecology
Authors:	Takayuki Ohgushi Susanne Wurst Scott N. Johnson
Keywords:	Ecology
Issue Date:	2018
Publisher:	Springer
Description:	For long, community ecologists have considered the world from either an aboveground or a belowground perspective. During most of the twentieth century, aboveground and belowground studies had their own specific research questions while apparently ignoring conceptual developments and approaches in the neighboring subsystem. Certain aspects have been almost exclusively studied in one of the two subsystems. For example, evolutionary studies and multi-trophic interactions have been studied mostly aboveground, whereas belowground studies have been strongly focused on decomposition, mutualistic symbionts, and determining flows and fluxes of carbon and nutrients through feeding guilds in soil food webs. Already in 1960, the Green World Hypothesis by Hairston, Smith, and Slobodkin included both aboveground and belowground components, and in the end of the 1980s, Valerie Brown, Alan Gange, and coworkers showed how belowground and aboveground insecticides had differential effects on secondary succession in restored grasslands. At the same time, research on plant–soil feedback interactions generated interest in unraveling the contribution of belowground biota to plant community dynamics and ecosystem development. Then came the turn of the millennium and work on aboveground–belowground interactions took off, first mainly driven by soil ecologists and soon joined in by plant ecologists and entomologists. First studies involved relatively simple experiments with plants, insects aboveground, and insects belowground, soon expanding complexity with numbers of insect species, types of functional groups, and also other taxa, such as nematodes, mycorrhizal fungi, and, later, plant pathogens. Most of these studies were undertaken first by ecologists, followed by molecular biologists using their model species to unravel how signal transduction pathways and other molecular mechanisms make aboveground and belowground biota interact. Agronomists stepped in relatively late, so that many of the aboveground–belowground interactions still remain to be tested under farmers’ field conditions. Most likely, interest will grow and the concept of plant phytobiomes, which has been successfully coined by phytopathologists, may further boost the application of aboveground–belowground interactions in production ecosystems.
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/55149
ISBN:	978-3-319-91614-9
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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