Relationships between conditioning and responding plant species.
To explore relationships between the abundance of plant species that
were sown in the conditioning plant communities (May 2017) and present
in the responding plant communities (August 2018), we constructed
correlation plots for each of the six conditioning plant communities. In
these correlation plots, relationships between conditioning and
responding plant species are indicative of soil-mediated effects between
the species (i.e., plant-soil feedbacks). We included only those species
that comprised greater than 0.25% average cover and that were present
in at least 3 plots. Furthermore, we included grass and forb cover and
total cover, to reveal whether observed vegetation patterns are driven
by individual conditioning or responding species. All correlation plots
were corrected for multiple comparisons using a Bonferroni correction.
For visualization, all pairwise correlations were shown at a
significance of p<0.01. All correlation matrices were
constructed using the package ‘corrplot ’ in R (Wei & Simko
2017).