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).