Fertilization management reshapes plant-nematode interactions across global ecosystems

Understanding how fertilization shapes the composition and functioning of soil nematodes is critical for maximizing agricultural sustainability and plant productivity. However, we lack a unified understanding of how different fertilizer regimes influence the nematode-plant productivity relationship across the globe.

This study aimed to investigate whether targeted fertilization, such as organic fertilization, alters nematode community structure and function, and how these changes relate to plant productivity.

Here, we integrate a global meta-analysis of fertilization experiments and machine learning-based predictions to address this gap.

We show that fertilizer type strongly regulates nematodes and plant performance globally. Organic fertilizers increase total nematode abundance, shift community composition toward bacterivore dominance and promote plant productivity, whereas mineral fertilizers weaken this positive effect and lead to a negative correlation between plant productivity and herbivores. Structural equation and global prediction models further indicate that these positive effects of bacterivores and organic fertilization on plant productivity are particularly strong in warmer climates, such as South Asia, Central Africa, and Northern South America, suggesting climatic modulation of fertilizer and soil nematode effects.

These findings highlight that agricultural management traits fundamentally shape plant-nematode interactions, emphasizing the pivotal role of soil nematodes in linking fertilization practices to ecosystem productivity.