Earth's Systems / Biological processes / Terrestrial ecosystem functioning / Organism-environment interactions / Ecosystem engineering and plant-soil feedback
Ecosystem engineering and plant-soil feedback
How organisms modify their physical environment, how plant traits drive litter quality and fertility, and how these changes feed back to favour similar species.
Boundary: where this process starts
Starts with: Organisms modify habitat as ecosystem engineers
Boundary: where it ends
Ends after: Soil biota diversity supports many ecosystem functions at once; Plant-soil feedback via litter quality
Line thickness = size of impact (1 to 5)% on a line = chance a fork takes that branch📄 = pieces of evidence on a stepNegative effectLoops backHypothesisResource used up (arrow into the step)Resource used, not used upResource made or released (arrow out of the step)
What am I looking at? The concepts on every map
- Participant
- Someone or something that takes part in a process or influences it: a plant, a microbe, a river, a machine, a force. Participants are the rows of a map.
- Resource
- Something a step uses or uses up: water, oxygen, sunlight, a tool. Each step has an arrow down to the resources it uses.
- Step
- One thing that happens in a process. Every step has at least one participant and carries evidence.
- Decision fork
- A step where the process can go several ways. Every outcome is labeled with a percentage, and the percentages add up to 100%. It is not limited to yes or no.
- Loop
- A line that carries the process back to an earlier step. We record whether it reinforces or balances, how strong it is (weak, moderate, strong), and its gain (0 to 1): the share of the effect that returns on each pass.
- Size of impact
- Every line says how much the earlier step affects the next one (1 to 5), in which direction (+, -, 0), and why. Thicker lines mean bigger impact.
- Evidence
- The support for a claim: a source and what it shows. Every step, line, change and vote needs it. Click any step or line to read its evidence.
- Boundary
- Where a process starts and where it ends. Every process, and every subprocess, has a start and an end.
- Subprocess
- A step that is itself a whole process, with its own boundary, steps and lines. Click a step marked ↘ to open it. Subprocesses nest as deep as the evidence goes.
- Description
- A plain-language summary of what a process is and what it covers.
- Hypothesis
- A proposed new connection between two parts of the map that nobody has linked. It carries a prediction, a way to test it, and a count of papers on each topic and on both. It is an unverified idea until someone tests it.
Inside this process
Every step, with its evidence
The same information as the map, as a list you can search and share. Click a participant or resource to see everywhere it appears.
Organisms modify habitat as ecosystem engineers
Evidence (1) · added by Broad
- Jones 1994, Organisms as ecosystem engineers, Oikos (book chapter), doi:10.1007/978-1-4612-4018-1_14: Ecosystem engineers create, modify and maintain habitats. (confidence 0.75)
Plant traits shape belowground communities
Evidence (1) · added by Broad
- Wardle 2004, Ecological linkages between aboveground and belowground biota, Science, doi:10.1126/science.1094875: Plant community composition determines soil biota through litter and root inputs. (confidence 0.7)
Soil biota diversity supports many ecosystem functions at once
Evidence (1) · added by Broad
- Bardgett & van der Putten 2014, Belowground biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, Nature, doi:10.1038/nature13855: Belowground biodiversity underpins multiple ecosystem functions. (confidence 0.7)
↘ Plant-soil feedback via litter quality
Evidence (1) · added by Broad
- Hobbie 2015, Plant species effects on nutrient cycling: revisiting litter feedbacks, Trends in Ecology & Evolution, doi:10.1016/j.tree.2015.03.015: Plant species affect nutrient cycling through litter traits, and the resulting fertility feeds back on plant fitness. (confidence 0.7)