To understand the mechanisms for species coexistence or assembly of forest woody community is essential for expecting the response of forest ecosystem functions to future environmental changes. It is recently suggested that plant-soil feedbacks could affect the species coexistence or community assembly, but their roles are not rarely investigated in a diverse forest community. To do so, we first elucidate the relationships between plant functional traits of woody species and soil properties at a community level in a diverse cool-temperate deciduous forest.
Soil samples were collected at every intersection of 10m x 10m grid in a core plot (1.2-ha) of the 6-ha plot, where all individuals of woody species with > 5cm in their dbh are measured and mapped, at Ogawa Forest Reserve, Ibaraki, Japan. Bulk density, soil moisture, soil pH, the contents of ammonium and nitrate, and nitrification rate were measured for 144 points in total. Functional traits, such as leaf mass area and foliar nitrogen, were measured for all the woody species found in the plot. In this talk, we will show the associations among the measured soil properties and between the functional traits and the soil properties to discuss the interaction between plants and soils.