Figure 1. Changes in microbial community during plant range-expansions.
A. When plants move from the southern range to a new range, range expanders can be either related to the native flora (circles) or unrelated (stars). B. Hypothesized responses of microbial community similarity and pathogen relative abundance to range-expansion; where we expect observed patterns to be stronger in the rhizosphere (solid lines) than in the bulk soil (dashed lines), and that the relatedness of the range-expander to the native flora will affect the strength of the response.