Dataset and analyses for publication entitled: “Acclimation of the nitrogen cycle to changes in precipitation”

This dataset contains data and analysis code for the paper entitled “Acclimation of the nitrogen cycle to changes in precipitation" by Currier et al. As the frequency of precipitation extremes are expected to increase, especially in arid regions, we asked how prolonged shifts in water availability facilitate acclimation of the N cycle in a semiarid grassland. Using natural abundances of stable nitrogen isotopes for dominant plants and soils and rainfall manipulation experiments, we tested the hypothesis that N cycling will interact with water availability further amplifying the openness of the N cycle through time. For the dominant plant species, we found the relationship for N availability vs. ambient annual precipitation to be significantly positive, contrary to global spatial models. We also considered the temporal dynamics of our experiments, which imposed directional rainfall manipulations in duration ranging from 5 to 14 years. The slopes of these relationships decreased (became less positive) with more time since the onset of the directional precipitation extremes. These data and metadata supplement long-term foliar and soil isotope data from the Jornada LTER (Dataset ID: knb-lter-jrn.210586001) with a large spatial dataset from NEON data package DP1.10026.001 and Craine et al. 2018 (https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.v2k2607).