Home‐field advantage of litter decomposition differs between leaves and fine roots

The 'home-field advantage' (HFA) hypothesis suggests that litter decomposes faster beneath the plant species it derived from than beneath other species because the local adaptation of decomposer community. Yet, this hypothesis is mainly based on observations using leaf litter, and very few studies have assessed whether root litter also decomposes faster in its 'home' environment. We conducted a reciprocal litter transplant experiment among three subtropical forest sites dominated by different tree species and quantified HFA effects for leaf and root litters at six sampling dates over 1132 days. We found that HFA effects were greater for leaves than roots, indicating that HFA is not more pronounced for recalcitrant than labile litter. However, HFA effects were generally inconsistent between leaf and root litters. This underscores the necessity to better understand the interactions between microbial communities above- and below-ground for predicting the responses of plant traits to global changes and their afterlife effects during the decomposition process. Therefore, we conclude that although plant-microbe interactions contribute significantly to nutrient and carbon cycling, these interactions may strongly depend on the plant organ considered and the environmental conditions at the local scale.