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. 2023 Oct 9;17(12):2190–2199. doi: 10.1038/s41396-023-01512-y

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© The Author(s) 2023

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Fig. 4 — a–d Drought threshold: microbial community diversity, composition and multifunctionality depending on minimum water holding capacity (WHC) experienced by soils. e Functional capacity of soils evaluated by principal non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) analysis with schematic representation of a shift to an alternative state. Mild or intermediate drought (blue arrows) moved the system from the reference state (circle on the left), but they bounced back. Intense drought (red arrow) moved the system further away, crossing a threshold, into an alternative state (circle on the right). f–h Diagrammatic representations of the effects of drought on the system, represented as a ball moving up and out of the stability basin. Mild or intermediate drought do not push the ball far enough, bouncing back to the reference state (f), while intense drought pushes the ball out of the reference state into a different stability basin, an alternative state (g), with distinct functionality and microbial community composition (h).