Soil freezing and N deposition: transient vs multi-year effects on plant productivity and relative species abundance

Plant responses to increased atmospheric nitrogen (N) deposition must be considered in the context of a rapidly changing climate. Reductions in snow cover with climate warming can increase the exposure of herbaceous plants to freezing, but it is unclear how freezing damage may interact with increased N availability, and to what extent freezing effects may extend over multiple years. We explored potential interactions between freezing damage and N availability in the context of plant productivity and relative species abundance in a temperate old field using both snow removal and mesocosm experiments, and assessed the legacy effects of the freezing damage over 3 yr. As expected, N addition increased productivity and freezing damage decreased productivity, but these factors were nonadditive; N addition increased productivity disproportionately in the snow removal plots, whereas extreme freezing diminished N addition responses in the mesocosm experiment. Freezing altered relative species abundances, although only the most severe freezing treatments exhibited legacy effects on total productivity over multiple growing seasons. Our results emphasize that while both increased N deposition and freezing damage can have multi-year effects on herbaceous communities, the interactions between these global change factors are contingent on the intensities of the treatments.