Drylands constitute 41% of the terrestrial surface and are home to over 38% of the human population, and these numbers are likely to increase as a consequence of desertification and projected population growth (Bestelmeyer et al., 2015;Peters et al., 2015). With 10%-20% of drylands worldwide already defined as degraded, the United Nations has declared restoring degraded drylands as a top priority for supporting human life in the coming decades (Cherlet et al., 2018). Despite time-consuming and expensive efforts, dryland restoration success remains low (Copeland et al., 2018). High temperatures, scarce and variable precipitation, low vegetation cover, and low soil nutrient availability contribute to the vulnerability, and low recovery potential, of these fragile ecosystems (Havrilla et al., 2020;.Low vegetation cover in drylands emphasizes the crucial role that soil microbial communities may play in ecological restoration because microbes provide ecosystem functions normally delivered by plants in more vegetated ecosystems (Blankinship et al., 2016;Costantini et al., 2016). Micro-organisms engineer soil structure that

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Cheatgrass invasion of Intermountain sagebrush steppe in the Western US poses increasing challenges to the function and survival of this native ecosystem. The invasive success and persistence of cheatgrass has been attributed to its physiology, phenology, and recently to increases in soil nitrogen levels. We investigated whether cheatgrass invasion of sagebrush/native bunchgrass communities elevated soil ammonium and nitrate levels, and resulted in soil microbial community diversity and composition changes. Our results did not reveal an increase in nitrogen ions, but showed a shift in soil microbial communities towards bacterial functional groups that can promote nitrogen accumulation in cheatgrass invaded communities.