Discussion
Our study addressed a key knowledge gap, namely, how past environmental
conditions and plant communities influence soil microbial diversity
which subsequently creates PSFs that can fundamentally alter plant
diversity-productivity relationships. We found that
1) plant diversity and drought
resulted in different soil microbial communities, leading to soil
legacies that had subsequent effects of plant-soil feedbacks; 2) and
that these soil legacies of drought and plant diversity influenced the
strength of subsequent plant diversity-productivity relationships; 3)
plant communities in soil that experienced past drought conditions
usually had more positive complementarity effects and more negative
selection effects.