{"paper_id":"34865315-5a51-4e50-af96-ca683a4030f9","body_text":"This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint.\nYou must log in to post a comment.\nThere are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article.\nThis is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint.\nAdd a Comment\nYou must log in to post a comment.\nComments\nThere are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article.\nInteractions between plants and mycorrhizal fungi shape nutrient cycling and ecosystem function on a global scale, but the dynamics of these interactions remain poorly understood. Due to their below-ground nature, directly observing key dynamical features such as Allee effects and oscillations is often not possible, hampering further progress in this area. Here we present a mechanistic model of plant-mycorrhizal interactions to address this issue. By integrating the facilitative and the antagonistic elements of plant-mycorrhizal interactions with explicit plant-nutrient dynamics, our framework generates testable predictions about the dynamics and persistence of these interactions. We find that plant-mycorrhizal interactions can exhibit different dynamical realms ranging from Allee effects to consumer-resource oscillations, and that these dynamics can be inferred from measurable system parameters (e.g., nutrient or carbohydrate uptake rates and saturation constants) and plant/fungal biomasses. Furthermore, we find that changes in the underlying soil nutrient supply can induce changes from one dynamical realm to another. Finally, we present a decision tree framework for characterizing the dynamics of real systems and discuss implications of our findings for plant-mycorrhizal communities in applied and natural contexts.\nhttps://doi.org/10.32942/X2NQ14\nLife Sciences\nmycorrhizae, mutualism, Species Interactions, Mechanistic model, population dynamics, nutrient limitation\nPublished: 2026-01-23 18:54\nLast Updated: 2026-01-23 18:54\nCC BY Attribution 4.0 International\nConflict of interest statement:\nNone\nData and Code Availability Statement:\nSimulation code and data are publicly available under Supplementary Files\nLanguage:\nEnglish","source_license":"CC-BY-4.0","license_restricted":false}