Description:
<jats:p>All living things, like humans, animals, plants, and even microbes, need to take up the same nutrient elements to live, most importantly nitrogen and phosphorus. Understanding the cycling of these elements through the ecosystem is one key to understanding why ecosystems work the way they do. One of the questions we are asking is if the diversity of organisms, like plants or insects, is related to these nutrient cycles. When plant communities are made up of many different plant species, they seem to make better use of the available soil nutrients than plant communities made up of fewer species. This may be because of something called complementarity, which means different plant species access the available nutrients in different ways, for example from different soil depths. In this article, we will describe the connections between plant biodiversity and soil nutrient cycling and discuss the implications for the functioning of the whole ecosystem.</jats:p>