The impact of current climate variability and projected future climate change on plant function, community structure, and ecosystem functioning is a topic of global concern and wide public interest. The amount and timing of precipitation is one of the critical climate factors that affects plant growth and governs the distribution and functioning of ecosystems on a global scale. Therefore, it is important to gain a collective understanding of the impacts that changes in water availability have on different vegetation types across various scales of interest. In recent years, technological advances and a greater availability of field monitoring equipment have enabled researchers to conduct larger numbers of complex, manipulative climate change experiments in the field. This session will bring together researchers from a wide variety of rainfall manipulation and climate change experiments across different regions and habitats to discuss and compare their findings on how plants will respond to altered water availability. By considering experiments that vary precipitation amounts as well as those that vary its temporal distribution, we will investigate how responses to warming interact with precipitation dynamics to affect critical ecological responses, from the scale of individual plants, to community composition, to nutrient cycling and ecosystem functioning. In this session, we will present salient findings from 7 different rainfall manipulation experiments (the Boston Area Climate Experiment; the Penn State Climate Change Experiment; the EVENT Experiment; the Konza Prairie LTER; the Kruger National Park rainfall manipulation in South Africa; the Prairie Heating and CO2 Enrichment Experiment; the Tolfa Allumiere rain manipulation experiment; and the Sevilleta LTER.) The talks in this organized session will be arranged from genotype level responses to ecosystem level responses to highlight the differences of scales at work in plant-water relations. In synthesizing these results, we hope to achieve a geographically broad overview of the effects of water availability on plant communities that transcends individual ecosystems/sites and can be used to discern general trends and highlight the implications of these findings to earth stewardship concerns.