Figure captions
Fig. 1 The effect of (a) leaf- and (b) soil-microbial
inoculation on plant productivity. Plant biomass was fitted in a linear
mixed-effect model as a function of plant diversity, soil, leaf
inoculation and their interactions with plant community composition
taken as a random term. From the model the marginal means of plant
biomass were extracted and contrasted between microbial treatments (see
Table S3 for the statistics, *p < 0.05; **p < 0.01;
***p < 0.001). The mean value and standard error of plant
biomass were shown.
Fig. 2 The relationships between plant diversity and biomass
for different microbial inoculation treatments. A linear mixed-effect
model was fitted to predict plant biomass as a function of plant
diversity, leaf and soil inoculation and their interactions with plant
composition taken as a random effect. The slopes of plant
diversity-biomass relationships were extracted from the model and
compared among microbe treatments using Tukey’s HSD, with different
letter labels in the box indicating significant difference in the
diversity-biomass slopes. Standard errors of plant biomass were shown.
We only present high-concentration leaf microbial inoculum since
low-concentration inoculum has no effect on plant productivity (See
Method).
Fig. 3 The net biodiversity effect (a), complementarity (b) and
selection effect(c) of plant biomass across microbial inoculation
treatments. The difference of biodiversity effect between groups was
tested using Tukey’s HSD. Groups with different letter labels above the
boxes have significantly different biodiversity effect at
p<0.05.
Fig. 4 The phylum-level taxonomic composition of (a) fungi and
(b) bacteria in microbial samples. Non-inoculated and inoculated soils
were collected at the end of the experiment, with L.0, L.1 and L.2
represent non-leaf microbe treatment, low- and high-concentration leaf
microbe treatments respectively. Leaf and soil inoculum as well as
background soil were collected at the beginning of the experiment,
representing the leaf and soil microbial communities collected in the
field and the background soil substrate used in the study.
Fig. 5 Distance-based redundancy analysis indicating the
variation in (a) bacterial and (b) fungal soil community composition
across microbial inoculation treatments and plant diversity. Arrows
represent the effect of plant diversity, soil inoculation (Soil),
low-concentration leaf inoculation (Leaf1) and high-concentration leaf
inoculation (Leaf2) on microbial community composition, with significant
relationships indicated by asterisks (see Table S4 for the statistics,
*p < 0.05; **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001).