James D. Bever

TL;DR: General models of annual hosts and soil-borne fungal pathogens are developed to explore the conditions for host-pathogen coexistence in both agricultural and natural plant populations, showing that stable coexistence is possible even when the pathogen has a positive intrinsic growth rate.

TL;DR: Support is found for alterations of the soil community causing negative plant soil feedback and positive legacy benefits of intercropping by reducing the negative influence of soil pathogen build-up on conspecific host plants and simultaneously compensatively improving growth of neighbor plants.

TL;DR: Overall, it is found that there is no evidence of a relationship between rhizobial salt-tolerance and impact on host growth performance, either in saline or non-saline soils, and there was no evidence that Salt-tolerant rhizobia perform better in more saline environments.

TL;DR: This chapter describes two possible types of dynamics: that of positive feedback and that of negative feedback, which directly contributes to the maintenance of diversity within both communities.

TL;DR: The data show that multiple rhizobia interacting with a single host species creates opportunities for emergent or higher‐order effects that extend beyond those that could be simply predicted based upon outcomes of pairwise interactions and that increased mutualist diversity does not necessarily translate into positive effects on plant growth.