Some bacterial taxa when stimulated by water additions will break dormancy, grow, and become dominant members of the community and contribute significant pulses of CO2 associated with the rewetting event. These pulses of activity are associated with high levels of bacterial productivity in soils. (Aanderud et al. 2011) We examined the bacterial taxa that resuscitate and become metabolically active following two forms of water stress (soil drying- rewetting and freeze-thaw cycles) and we captured and measured the CO2 emanating from those soils. Specifically, We used target metagenomics, which uses a specific gene pool within bacteria that is associated with a function of an ecological process, in this case active (16S rRNA communities) bacteria and all bacteria (16S rRNA communities) during drying-rewetting and freeze-thaw cycles. We measured an array of community dynamics (i.e., evenness, richness, diversity, relative abundance of taxa, and network analyses between taxa) as dry soils are rewetted and as frozen soils thaw multiple times in three cold desert soils. Soils from all three locations exhibited some similar bacterial taxa and gene function but were large in part their own community derived from the evolutionary history of the continent in which they reside.