Although plant–soil feedback (PSF) is being recognized as an important driver of plant recruitment, our understanding of its role in species coexistence in natural communities remains limited by the scarcity of experimental studies on multispecies assemblages. Here, we experimentally estimated PSFs affecting seedling recruitment in 10 co‐occurring Mediterranean woody species. We estimated weak but significant species‐specific feedback. Pairwise PSFs impose similarly strong fitness differences and stabilizing‐destabilizing forces, most often impeding species coexistence. Moreover, a model of community dynamics driven exclusively by PSFs suggests that few species would coexist stably, the largest assemblage with no more than six species. Thus, PSFs alone do not suffice to explain coexistence in the studied community. A topological analysis of all subcommunities in the interaction network shows that full intransitivity (with all species involved in an intransitive loop) would be rare but it would lead to species coexistence through either stable or cyclic dynamics.

中文翻译：

---

植物-土壤反馈中的不及物性很少见，但与多物种共存有关

尽管植物-土壤反馈（PSF）被认为是植物补充的重要驱动因素，但由于缺乏多物种组合的实验研究，我们对其在自然群落物种共存中的作用的理解仍然受到限制。在这里，我们通过实验估计了影响 10 种同时存在的地中海木本物种幼苗补充的 PSF。我们估计了微弱但重要的物种特异性反馈。成对的 PSF 也会产生同样强烈的适应度差异和稳定-不稳定力量，通常会阻碍物种共存。此外，完全由 PSF 驱动的群落动态模型表明，很少有物种能够稳定共存，最大的组合不超过 6 个物种。因此，仅 PSF 不足以解释所研究群体中的共存。对相互作用网络中所有子群落的拓扑分析表明，完全的不及物性（所有物种都参与不及物循环）将是罕见的，但它将通过稳定或循环动力学导致物种共存。