Souza, LaraWall, Zoe2024-07-242024-07-242024-08-01https://hdl.handle.net/11244/340497The relationships between plants and soil (plant-soil feedback, or PSF) are increasingly being investigated for their significant influence on vegetation diversity and ecosystem functioning. Although there is increasing understanding of PSF within plant functional groups and species origins, the effect of drought on PSF returns inconsistent results, at a community level. The Southern US Great Plains is a water-limited system and therefore sensitive to changes in precipitation regime. As drought conditions are expected to increase in the Great Plains and beyond, we intend to elucidate the complex mechanisms of PSF and their role in individual plant response to drought, as well as community strategy. Plant traits are often used to infer ecological strategy of individuals and communities, and can capture plant responses to PSF. The leaf economic spectrum indicates ecological strategies ranging from conservative (slow) to acquisitive (fast) resource use, and vary between functional groups and climatic conditions. Since PSF has the capacity to influence the rate of plant resource use, we hypothesized that drought legacy soil would inhibit plant growth and function due to a potential limitation of beneficial microbiological mutualisms under drought, and that community level strategy would shift toward resource conservatism, or slow resource use, for the same reason. We replicated two plant communities from the mixed-grass prairie in central Oklahoma: one which has been subject to long-term experimental drought for six years, and a reference plant community. We conditioned both plant communities in heterospecific and conspecific soil /(using soil cores collected from their respective drought treatment), and uninoculated soil. We measured individual plant response by biomass, growth rate, and leaf traits, and community response using community weighted means (CWM), weighting traits by biomass. At an individual level, we saw no difference in plant response to heterospecific and conspecific soils, but that plants generally had better response to inoculated soil than uninoculated soil. We also found shifts in biomass aboveground in reference plant communities when conditioned with drought soil. At a community level, we found that drought soil shifted ecological response of reference plant communities from resource conservative (in conspecific soil) to resource acquisitive, as indicated by leaf trait CWMs. Counter to our second hypothesis, this result suggests that drought legacy promotes a faster resource use strategy to plants.Community weighted meansPlant-soil feedbackClimate changeDrought