Fig. 6

Experiment 2 of microcosm study. a Diagram of experiment 2 design. b Seedling biomass in different trophic-level culturing systems incubated at 20 °C (left) and 15 °C (right), respectively. System I, Control, axenic culture; system II: within trophic-level culture; system III: multi-trophic-level culture. Each sample includes four seedlings of Arabidopsis thaliana. c Plant biomass stability in different trophic-level cultures. The data are shown as the means ± standard deviations (n = 12). The error bars with different letters indicate significant differences as determined by one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) followed by Tukey’s HSD test (P < 0.05)