Historical climate legacies in soil microbial communities exposed to extreme changes in rainfall

We tested whether extreme changes in rainfall could overcome constraints imposed by historical rainfall on how soil soil bacteria and fungi, and on how respiration responds to moisture. Over 4.5 years, we used rainfall exclusion shelters and irrigation to impose rain treatments ranging from extreme dry to extreme wet conditions that varied by ~400%, as well as ambient and historical mean rainfall controls. Rain treatments were applied to shortgrass or tallgrass vegetation that represented lower and higher biomass inputs, respectively, to test how shifts in soil resources might affect respiration moisture responses.