Abstract
Interactions between plants and microbiomes play a key role in ecosystem functioning, and are of broad interest due to their influence on nutrient cycling and plant protection. However, we do not yet have a complete understanding of how plant microbiomes are assembled. Here, for the first time, we show interactions between plant-associated microbial communities that drive their diversity and community composition. We manipulated soil microbial diversity, plant species, and herbivory, and found that soil microbial diversity influenced the herbivore-associated microbiome composition, but also plant species and herbivory influenced the soil microbiome composition. We used a novel approach, quantifying the relative strength of these effects, and demonstrated that the initial soil microbiome diversity explained the most variation in plant- and herbivore-associated microbial communities. Our findings strongly suggest that soil microbial community diversity is a driver of the composition of multiple associated microbiomes (plant and insect), and this has implications for the importance of management of soil microbiomes in multiple systems.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.