Climate change will result in reduced soil water availability in much of the world either due to changes in precipitation or increased temperature and evapotranspiration. How communities of mites and nematodes may respond to changes in moisture availability is not well known, yet these organisms play important roles in decomposition and nutrient cycling processes. We determined how communities of these organisms respond to changes in moisture availability and whether common patterns occur along fine-scale gradients of soil moisture within four individual ecosystem types (mesic, xeric and arid grasslands and a polar desert) located in the western United States and Antarctica, as well as across a cross-ecosystem moisture gradient (CEMG) of all four ecosystems considered together.

An elevation transect of three sampling plots was monitored within each ecosystem and soil samples were collected from these plots and from existing experimental precipitation manipulations within each ecosystem once in fall of 2009 and three times each in 2010 and 2011. Mites and nematodes were sorted to trophic groups and analyzed to determine community responses to changes in soil moisture availability. We found that while both mites and nematodes increased with available soil moisture across the CEMG, within individual ecosystems, increases in soil moisture resulted in decreases to nematode communities at all but the arid grassland ecosystem; mites showed no responses at any ecosystem. In addition, we found changes in proportional abundances of mite and nematode trophic groups as soil moisture increased within individual ecosystems, which may result in shifts within soil food webs with important consequences for ecosystem functioning. We suggest that communities of soil animals at local scales may respond predictably to changes in moisture availability regardless of ecosystem type but that additional factors, such as climate variability, vegetation composition, and soil properties may influence this relationship over larger scales.

In arid and semi-arid ecosystems, there are legacies of previous-year precipitation on current-year above-ground net primary production. We hypothesized that legacies of past precipitation occur through changes in tiller density, stolon density, tiller growth, axillary bud density and percentage of viable axillary buds. We examined the sensitivity to current- and previous-year precipitation of these grassland structural components in Bouteloua eriopoda, the dominant grass in the northern Chihuahuan Desert. We conducted a rainfall manipulation experiment consisting in −80% reduced precipitation, ambient, +80% increased precipitation treatments that were subjected to one of five precipitation levels in the previous two years (−80% and −50% reduced precipitation, ambient, +50% and +80% increased precipitation). The first two years preconditioned the experimental plots for year three, in which we created wet-to-dry and dry-to-wet transitions. Measurements were taken in year 3. We found that stolon density was the most sensitive to changes in precipitation and that percent-active buds were insensitive. We also found that past precipitation had a significant legacy on grassland structural components regardless of the precipitation received in the current year, and that the legacy occurs mostly through changes in stolon density. Here, we showed that there is a differential sensitivity of structural components to current and past precipitation and supported previous findings that vegetation structure is one of the controls of productivity during precipitation transitions.