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SummaryPlant 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.

Reduced precipitation treatments often are used in field experiments to explore the effects of drought on plant productivity and species composition. However, in seasonally snow-covered regions reduced precipitation also reduces snow cover, which can increase soil frost depth, decrease minimum soil temperatures and increase soil freeze-thaw cycles. Therefore, in addition to the effects of reduced precipitation on plants via drought, freezing damage to overwintering plant tissues at or below the soil surface could further affect plant productivity and relative species abundances during the growing season. We examined the effects of both reduced rainfall (via rain-out shelters) and reduced snow cover (via snow removal) at 13 sites globally (primarily grasslands) within the framework of the International Drought Experiment, a coordinated distributed experiment. Plant cover was estimated at the species level and aboveground biomass was quantified at the functional group level. Among sites, we observed a negative correlation between the snow removal effect on minimum soil temperature and plant biomass production the next growing season. Three sites exhibited significant rain-out shelter effects on plant productivity, but there was no correlation among sites between the rain-out shelter effect on minimum soil moisture and plant biomass. There was no interaction between snow removal and rain-out shelters for plant biomass, although these two factors only exhibited significant effects simultaneously for a single site. Overall, our results reveal that reduced snowfall, when it decreases minimum soil temperatures, can be an important component of the total effect of reduced precipitation on plant productivity.

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