Early findings suggest that familiar soil microbes help Ponderosa Pines to grow at warmer, drier sites.
Figure Caption: Aboveground biomass of ponderosa pine growing with different soil
organisms communities at three sites along a temperature and moisture
gradient. The bars indicate standard error of the mean – so only
difference which are larger than the size of those ‘error bars’ are
likely to be significant. Notice that plants are typically much smaller
when grown in sterile potting soil, with a big benefit from having a
home-team at the warm-dry sites.
