The impact of drought length and intensity on N cycling gene abundance, transcription and the size of an N2O hot moment from a temperate grassland soil

Summary

This study aimed to investigate the relationship between drought length, drought intensity and the size of the N2O hot moment. It selected two treatments to deduce the main nitrogen cycling process producing N2O (increasing WFPS from 40% to 90%, and from 70% to 90%), by destructively sampling soil cores to analyse gene abundance, transcription, and changes in soil chemistry (TON, NH4+, DOC). Five other drought and rewetting treatments on packed soil cores were selected to create the drought curves described in Barrat et al. (2020): these included increases of WFPS from 40% to 90%, 50%–90%, 60%–90%, 70%–90%, and 30%–60%. For each treatment, drought lengths were imposed from 0 to 30 days. A quadratic linear regression was fitted to the cumulative emissions data. This model explained a signif