Conditioning effects on soil fungal guilds.
We tested the effects of conditioning time, conditioning plant community, and forb:grass ratio including all interactions on i) specific groups of soil fungi (AMF, saprotrophs, total pathogens, forb pathogens, grass pathogens, and the dominating grass pathogenSlopeiomyces cylindrosporus ); ii) plant cover (i.e., total plant cover, forb and grass cover) with general linear mixed models. Plot number was included in the model as random effect, to indicate that one- and two-year conditioned subplots belonged to the same plot.
Normality and homogeneity of the residuals were checked and data were transformed when necessary (indicated in the respective summary tables). All mixed models were performed in R using the ‘nlme ’ package (Pinheiro et al. 2018).