The DOI matches its Crossref record; 123 of the 123 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Meta-analysis shows positive effects of plant diversity on microbial biomass and respiration
Open accessAbstract
Soil microorganisms are key to biological diversity and many ecosystem processes in terrestrial ecosystems. Despite the current alarming loss of plant diversity, it is unclear how plant species diversity affects soil microorganisms. By conducting a global meta-analysis with paired observations of plant mixtures and monocultures from 106 studies, we show that microbial biomass, bacterial biomass, fungal biomass, fungi:bacteria ratio, and microbial respiration increase, while Gram-positive to Gram-negative bacteria ratio decrease in response to plant mixtures. The increases in microbial biomass and respiration are more pronounced in older and more diverse mixtures. The effects of plant mixtures on all microbial attributes are consistent across ecosystem types including natural forests, planted forests, planted grasslands, croplands, and planted containers. Our study underlines strong relationships between plant diversity and soil microorganisms across global terrestrial ecosystems and suggests the importance of plant diversity in maintaining belowground ecosystem functioning.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Fitting Linear Mixed-Effects Models Using lme4
Bates, D., Mächler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2015) · Journal of Statistical Software · doi:10.18637/jss.v067.i01 · Cited by 86,835
Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses: the PRISMA statement
Moher, D., Liberati, A., Tetzlaff, J., Altman, D. G., & for the PRISMA Group (2009) · BMJ · doi:10.1136/bmj.b2535 · Cited by 83,823
Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses: The PRISMA Statement
Moher, D., Liberati, A., Tetzlaff, J., Altman, D. G., & The PRISMA Group (2009) · PLoS Medicine · doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1000097 · Cited by 64,042
Preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses: the PRISMA Statement.
(2009) · PubMed Central · Cited by 44,859
WorldClim 2: new 1‐km spatial resolution climate surfaces for global land areas
Fick, S. E., & Hijmans, R. J. (2017) · International Journal of Climatology · doi:10.1002/joc.5086 · Cited by 16,088
An extraction method for measuring soil microbial biomass C
Vance, E. D., Brookes, P. C., & Jenkinson, D. S. (1987) · Soil Biology and Biochemistry · doi:10.1016/0038-0717(87)90052-6 · Cited by 12,887
Biodiversity loss and its impact on humanity
Cardinale, B. J., Duffy, J. E., Gonzalez, A., Hooper, D. U., Perrings, C., Venail, P., Narwani, A., Mace, G. M., Tilman, D., Wardle, D. A., et al. (2012) · Nature · doi:10.1038/nature11148 · Cited by 7,457
The meta-analysis of response ratios in experimental ecology
Hedges, L. V., Gurevitch, J., & Curtis, P. S. (1999) · Ecology · doi:10.1890/0012-9658(1999)080[1150:tmaorr]2.0.co;2 · Cited by 4,704
Ecological Linkages Between Aboveground and Belowground Biota
Wardle, D. A., Bardgett, R. D., Klironomos, J. N., Setälä, H., van der Putten, W. H., & Wall, D. H. (2004) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1094875 · Cited by 4,617
Belowground biodiversity and ecosystem functioning
Bardgett, R. D., & van der Putten, W. H. (2014) · Nature · doi:10.1038/nature13855 · Cited by 3,990
Cited by
Yang, Y., Chen, X., Liu, L., Li, T., Dou, Y., Qiao, J., Wang, Y., An, S., & Chang, S. X. (2022) · Global Change Biology · doi:10.1111/gcb.16361 · Cited by 279
Self-citationNegative effects of multiple global change factors on soil microbial diversity
Yang, Y., Li, T., Wang, Y., Cheng, H., Chang, S. X., Liang, C., & An, S. (2021) · Soil Biology and Biochemistry · doi:10.1016/j.soilbio.2021.108229 · Cited by 269
Forest thinning increases soil carbon stocks in China
Gong, C., Tan, Q., Liu, G., & Xu, M. (2021) · Forest Ecology and Management · doi:10.1016/j.foreco.2020.118812 · Cited by 103
Bates, C. T., Escalas, A., Kuang, J., Hale, L., Wang, Y., Herman, D., Nuccio, E. E., Wan, X., Bhattacharyya, A., Fu, Y., et al. (2022) · The ISME Journal · doi:10.1038/s41396-021-00916-y · Cited by 17
Metadata
- Authors
- Chen, C., Chen, H. Y. H., Chen, X., & Huang, Z.
- Venue
- Nature Communications
- Published
- 2019-03-22
- Volume
- 10
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 1332-1332
- ISSN
- 2041-1723 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2923010662
- Cited by
- 452
- References
- 123
- FWCI
- 30.05
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Meta-analysis shows positive effects of plant diversity on microbial biomass and respiration. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1038/s41467-019-09258-y
- The paper
- Chen, C., Chen, H. Y. H., Chen, X., & Huang, Z. (2019). Meta-analysis shows positive effects of plant diversity on microbial biomass and respiration. Nature Communications. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-09258-y
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
