Climate change induced range expanding plants experience less belowground enemy impact

Due to climate warming many plant species in Europe expand their ranges northwards. The aim of our project is to determine how plant species expanding ranges from southern latitudes to northern latitudes perform in their new environment. Range expanding plant species might have lost part of their native soil community when dispersing into their new range and therefore could have an advantage over native plant species in their new environment. To test this we conducted a phylogenetically controlled experiment with cross comparison of plants grown in soil conditioned by their own species and a control soil conditioned by other species. We found that range expanders performed equally well on their own soil than on the control, native plants on the contrary, performed less well on their own soil compared to the control. This revealed a possible competitive benefit for the exotic range expanders over the native plant. Recently, we have profiled the belowground community of fungi and bacteria using PCR-DGGE. Within soil treatments, native and range expanding plants had significant dissimilar soil communities. Moreover, when we compared the amount of plant parasitic nematodes per gram root biomass, there were less plant parasites in roots of range expanders than in native plant roots. Herewith, we show that patterns in the soil communities reflect the aboveground plant performance and provide a possible mechanism that could play a role in the abundance of range expanding invaders