Plant functional types regulate non-additive responses of soil respiration to 5-year warming and nitrogen addition in a semi-arid grassland

How climate warming interacts with atmospheric nitrogen (N) deposition to affect carbon (C) release from soils remains largely elusive, posing a major challenge in projecting climate change‒terrestrial C feedback. As part of a 5-year (2006–2010) field manipulative experiment, this study was designed to examine the effects of 24-hr continuous warming and N addition on soil respiration and explore the underlying mechanisms in a semi-arid grassland on the Mongolian Plateau, China. Across the 5 years and all plots, soil respiration was not changed under the continuous warming, but was decreased by 3.7% under the N addition. The suppression of soil respiration by N addition in the third year and later could be mainly due to the reductions in the forb-to-grass biomass ratios. Moreover, there were interactive effects between continuous warming and N addition on soil respiration. Continuous warming increased soil respiration by 5.8% in the ambient N plots, but reduced it by 6.3% in the enriched N plots. Soil respiration was unaffected by N addition in the ambient temperature plots yet decreased by 9.4% in the elevated temperature plots. Changes of soil moisture and the proportion of legume biomass in the community might be primarily responsible for the non-additive effects of continuous warming and N addition on soil respiration. This study provides empirical evidence for the positive climate warming‒soil C feedback in the ambient N condition. However, N deposition reverses the positive warming‒soil C feedback into a negative feedback, leading to decreased C loss from soils under a warming climate. Incorporating our findings into C-cycling models could reduce the uncertainties of model projections for land C sink and global C cycling under multifactorial global change scenarios. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.