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Plant roots are the primary source of soil organic carbon (C) and critically support the growth and activities of microbes in the rhizosphere. Climate change factors may, however, modify root-microbial interactions and impact C dynamics in the rhizosphere. Yet, the direction and magnitude of interactive climate change effects, as well as the underlying mechanisms, remain unclear. Here we show evidence from a field experiment demonstrating that warming and precipitation changes strengthen root controls over litter decomposition in a semi-arid grassland. While warming and precipitation reduction suppressed microbial decomposition of root litter regardless of the root presence, precipitation increase stimulated litter decomposition only in the absence of roots, suggesting that plant competition for water constraints the activities of saprophytic microbes. Root presence increased microbial biomass but reduced microbial activities such as respiration, C cycling enzymes and litter decomposition, indicating that roots exert differential effects on microbes through altering C or water availability. In addition, nitrogen (N) input significantly reduced microbial biomass and microbial activities (respiration). Together, these results showed that alterations in soil moisture induced by climate change drivers critically modulate root controls over microbial decomposition in soil. Our findings suggest that warming-enhanced plant water utilization, combined with N-induced suppression of microbes, may provide a unique mechanism through which moderate increases in precipitation, warming and N input interactively suppress microbial decomposition, thereby facilitating short-term soil C sequestration in the arid and semi-arid grasslands.

Daytime warming and nighttime warming have the potential to influence plant community structure and ecosystem functions. However, their impacts on ecological stability remain largely unexplored. We conducted an eight-year field experiment to compare the effects of daytime and nighttime warming on the temporal stability of a temperate steppe in northern China. Our results showed that the cover and stability of dominant species, stability of subordinate species, and compensatory dynamics among species strongly influenced community-level stability. However, daytime, but not nighttime, warming significantly reduced community temporal stability mainly through the reduction in the abundance of dominant, stable species. These findings demonstrate the differential effects of daytime and nighttime warming on community stability and emphasize the importance of understanding the changes of dominant species for accurately predicting community dynamics under climate warming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global warming intensifies the hydrological cycle, which results in changes in precipitation regime (frequency and amount), and will likely have significant impacts on soil respiration (R s ). Although the responses of R s to changes in precipitation amount have been extensively studied, there is little consensus on how R s will be affected by changes in precipitation frequency (PF) across the globe. Here, we synthesized the field observations from 296 published papers to quantify the effects of PF on R s and its components using meta-analysis. Our results indicated that the effects of PF on R s decreased with an increase in background mean annual precipitation. When the data were grouped by climate conditions, increased PF showed positive effects on R s under the arid condition but not under the semi-humid or humid conditions, whereas decreased PF suppressed R s across all the climate conditions. The positive effects of increased PF mainly resulted from the positive response of heterotrophic respiration under the arid condition while the negative effects of decreased PF were mainly attributed to the reductions in root biomass and respiration. Overall, our global synthesis provided for the first time a comprehensive analysis of the divergent effects of PF on R s and its components across climate regions. This study also provided a framework for understanding and modeling responses of ecosystem carbon cycling to global precipitation change., (© 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)