Zhang Z. J. auteur aut IRD Liu Y. J. auteur aut IRD Brunel Caroline auteur aut IRD van Kleunen M. auteur aut IRD text journalArticle eng text/pdf born digital access Sixty year ago, Charles Elton posed that species-rich communities should be more resistant to biological invasion. Still, little is known about which processes could drive the diversity-invasibility relationship. Here we examined whether soil-microbe-mediated apparent competition on alien invaders is more negative when the soil originates from multiple native species. We trained soils with five individually grown native species and used amplicon sequencing to analyze the resulting bacterial and fungal soil communities. We mixed the soils to create trained soils from one, two or four native species. We then grew four alien species separately on these differently trained soils. In the soil-conditioning phase, the five native species built species-specific bacterial and fungal communities in their rhizospheres. In the test phase, it did not matter for biomass of alien plants whether the soil had been trained by one or two native species. However, the alien species achieved 11.7% (95% CI: 3.7-20.1%) less aboveground biomass when grown on soils trained by four native species than on soils trained by two native species. Our results revealed soil-microbes-mediated apparent competition as a mechanism underlying the negative relationship between diversity and invasibility. specialized apparent competition diversity invasibility mutualists pathogens plant invasion plant-soil feedback soil legacy soil microbes soil mixture 076 020 074 101 12 e03187 [10 ] 2020 0012-9658 https://www.documentation.ird.fr/hor/fdi:010079792 10.1002/ecy.3187 0012-9658 [F B010079792] https://www.documentation.ird.fr/hor/fdi:010079792 https://www.documentation.ird.fr/intranet/publi/2020/10/010079792.pdf Accès réservé (Intranet de l'IRD) IRD - Base Horizon / Pleins textes 2020-11-12 2021-06-03 fdi:010079792 fre