We did not detect any treatment effects on microarthropod abundance. In November, but not in June, microarthropod richness, however, was affected by the climate change treatments. In November, total microarthropod richness was lower in dry than in wet treatments, and in ambient temperature treatments, richness was higher under elevated [CO2] than under ambient [CO2]. Differential responses of individual taxa to the climate change treatments resulted in shifts in community composition. In general, the precipitation and warming treatments explained most of the variation in community composition. Across treatments, we found that collembola abundance and richness were positively related to soil moisture content, and that negative relationships between collembola abundance and richness and soil temperature could be explained by temperature-related shifts in soil moisture content.
Our data demonstrate how simultaneously acting climate change factors can affect the structure of soil microarthropod communities in old-field ecosystems. Overall, changes in soil moisture content, either as direct effect of changes in precipitation or as indirect effect of warming or elevated [CO2], had a larger impact on microarthropod communities than did the direct effects of the warming and elevated [CO2] treatments. Moisture-induced shifts in soil microarthropod abundance and community composition may have important impacts on ecosystem functions, such as decomposition, under future climatic change.