These results indicate that informed assembly of plant communities based on plant traits could aid in the restoration of functioning in degraded soil.Īs one of the trait‐based approaches, leaf economics spectrum (LES) has led to significant advances in plant ecology however, hypothetical root economics spectrum (RES) which is even more important than the LES aboveground is still less well understood. We suggest that screening recently restored grassland communities for potential soil multifunctionality and drought resilience may be possible based on rooting architecture and plant height. Finally, after 3 yr of the experiment, we did not detect any links between the plant traits and microbial communities, supporting the finding that traits based on plant structure and resource foraging capacity are the main variables driving soil function in the early years of grassland conversion. Drought resistance of soil functions including ecosystem respiration, mineralization, and nitrification were positively related to functional divergence of rooting depth, indicating that, in shallow chalk soils, a range of water capture strategies is necessary to maintain functions. Further, complexity of root architecture was positively related to soil multifunctionality throughout the season, with fine fibrous roots being associated with greater rates of nutrient cycling. We propose that this was due to an exploitative resource capture strategy that was inappropriate in shallow chalk soils. We found strong evidence that community weighted mean (CWM) of plant height is negatively associated with soil nitrogen cycling and availability and soil multifunctionality. This formed a range of plant trait syndromes onto which we superimposed a simulated drought 2 yr after initial establishment. We sowed three trait-based plant functional groups, assembled using database derived values of plant traits, and their combinations into bare soil. These hypotheses were tested in a 3-yr grassland restoration experiment on degraded ex-arable land in southern England. We further hypothesized that communities dominated by species with deeper roots may be more resilient to drought. Here we test the hypothesis that taller species, or those with complex rooting structures, are associated with high rates of nutrient and carbon (C) cycling in grassland. However, our understanding is limited concerning the relative importance of different plant traits for soil functions and of the mechanisms by which traits influence soil properties in the real world. It is increasingly recognized that belowground responses to vegetation change are closely linked to plant functional traits. However, disturbances that increase light and soil resource availability at local scales may allow acquisitive species, especially invasive exotics, to continue colonizing late into the community transition to forest. Decreasing soil nutrient availability and increasing belowground competition may become increasingly strong filters in successional communities, acting on root traits to promote a transition from acquisitive to conservative foraging. Species with more acquisitive fine‐root morphologies typically had faster rates of abundance increase and achieved their maximal rates in fewer years. In addition to having more acquisitive root traits than native species, exotics diverged from the above successional trend, having consistently thinner fine roots regardless of the community context. Species that reached their peak abundance early in succession had fine‐root traits corresponding to resource acquisitive strategies (i.e., they were thinner, less dense, and had higher nitrogen concentrations) while species that peaked progressively later had increasingly conservative strategies. exotic) in defining functional relationships, we also assessed whether traits or their relationships with species dynamics differed for these groups. non‐woody) and species origin (native vs. Given the prominent roles of life form (woody vs. Our analysis included 85 species from a long‐term data set on the transition from old field to forest in eastern North America (the Buell‐Small Succession Study) and the new Fine‐Root Ecology Database. We address this gap by investigating associations between belowground traits and metrics of species dynamics.

Despite the importance of fine roots for the acquisition of soil resources such as nitrogen and water, the study of linkages between traits and both population and community dynamics remains focused on aboveground traits.

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