Bever, James D2024-09-302024-09-302023-12-18Wang G, Burrill HM, Podzikowski LY, Eppinga MB, Zhang F, Zhang J, Schultz PA, Bever JD. Dilution of specialist pathogens drives productivity benefits from diversity in plant mixtures. Nat Commun. 2023 Dec 18;14(1):8417. doi: 10.1038/s41467-023-44253-4. PMID: 38110413; PMCID: PMC10728191https://hdl.handle.net/1808/35572Productivity benefits from diversity can arise when compatible pathogen hosts are buffered by unrelated neighbors, diluting pathogen impacts. However, the generality of pathogen dilution has been controversial and rarely tested within biodiversity manipulations. Here, we test whether soil pathogen dilution generates diversity- productivity relationships using a field biodiversity-manipulation experiment, greenhouse assays, and feedback modeling. We find that the accumulation of specialist pathogens in monocultures decreases host plant yields and that pathogen dilution predicts plant productivity gains derived from diversity. Pathogen specialization predicts the strength of the negative feedback between plant species in greenhouse assays. These feedbacks significantly predict the overyielding measured in the field the following year. This relationship strengthens when accounting for the expected dilution of pathogens in mixtures. Using a feedback model, we corroborate that pathogen dilution drives overyielding. Combined empirical and theoretical evidence indicate that specialist pathogen dilution generates overyielding and suggests that the risk of losing productivity benefits from diversity may be highest where environmental change decouples plant-microbe interactions.Copyright © The Author(s) 2023 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Article10.1038/s41467-023-44253-438110413openAccess