Abstract
Climate change intensifies persistent weather patterns characterized by progressively longer dry and wet periods. However, how these weather patterns affect soil microbial communities over a long timescale remains elusive. Here we subjected grassland mesocosms to an eight-level gradient of dry-wet alternation frequencies from 1 to 60 days (representing low to high weather persistence) over two growing seasons, simultaneously initiating dry and wet phases. Results showed that the effects of weather persistence on soil microbial communities were stronger in the second year (360 and 480 days), with more divergent microbial communities between treatments, compared to the first year (120 days). Moreover, the dissimilarity of microbial communities across three sampling times decreased as weather persistence increased, except for bacterial communities at the wet conditions. The intensified impacts on microbes are due to progressively persistent weather and decreasing plant productivity. Our findings reveal distinct response mechanisms of soil microbes to weather persistence.
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Data availability
The data that support the findings of this study are available at the European Nucleotide Archive under the accession number PRJEB80869.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the University of Antwerp BOF/GOA Project REGIME SHIFT and National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 42507182). The experiments were performed utilizing the ESFRI-AnaEE FATI platform funded by FWO projects G0H4117N, I0000719N and I001921N, and the Flemish government (HERMES Fund). We thank Lisa Psarocosta for assisting with molecular analyses.
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Lingjuan Li: conceptualization, investigation, methodology, formal analysis, writing—original draft. Dajana Radujković, Qiang Lin, Ivan Nijs, Hans De Boeck, and Gerrit T.S. Beemster: review & editing. Erik Verbruggen: conceptualization, supervision, writing—review & editing.
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Communications Earth and Environment thanks Xiangyang Shu and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Primary Handling Editors: Somaparna Ghosh. A peer review file is available.
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Li, L., Radujković, D., Nijs, I. et al. Effect of increasing persistence of alternating drought and rainfall events on grassland soil microbes intensifies over time. Commun Earth Environ (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-026-03355-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-026-03355-9
