Soils contain between 1500–2400 gigatons of carbon and the fate of this carbon is unknown as Earth’s climate changes. One of the largest sources of uncertainty is predicting and understanding microbial biogeochemistry. Viruses that infect microbes can be major players in microbial biogeochemistry via top-down controls by lysing microbes and releasing their necromass, and bottom-up controls by modulating microbial metabolism. Research on the diversity and functional capabilities of soil viruses is expanding near-exponentially, however, current methods are fragmented, limiting our ability to make connections important to soil and global ecology. We hypothesize that virus-microbe interactions and microbial ecophysiology fundamentally shape soil carbon persistence and we focus on soil moisture as a 'master controller' of viral and microbial activity. We simulated a precipitation event using heavy water (H218O), treated half of the samples with a phosphorus addition (It has also been shown that phosphorus concentration can affect the number of virus particles produced during an lytic infection), and sampled over a month (T0, 1, 2, and 3 weeks) with stable isotope probing targeted metagenomics (to identify active organisms and proviruses) and viromics (to identify active virions), combined with bulk metatranscriptomics (to identify RNA viruses and capture gene expression) and environmental DNA (eDNA) surveys (to characterize the origin and persistence). A bird’s-eye view of the data revealed in the dry soils eDNA and integrated RNA viruses are very abundant, but then one week after wet-up, we see a surge of microbial and integrated DNA virus activity coinciding with a large production of carbon dioxide (CO2) and a decrease in eDNA and integrated RNA viruses. The second week after wet-up, we see another surge in DNA virus activity but in virion production coinciding with a large drop in microbial abundance, an increase in eDNA and RNA virus abundance. The third week after wet-up, we see the microbial and DNA virus communities ‘stabilizing’, eDNA abundance slightly decreasing, but a surge in RNA virus abundance. Notably, the virus dynamics described occurred in both the phosphorus-amended and unamended samples, but there were significant differences in the virus communities in the DNA viruses from viromes and the RNA viruses. We further investigated the eDNA by mapping eDNA reads to our other data pools and interestingly, the vast majority of eDNA reads appeared to be microbial in origin. Given the small amount of eDNA that mapped to viruses and the increase in virions detected using viromics post-wet-up, we posit that viral DNA may not persist in soil, indicating that either viral DNA is quickly degraded, or temperate viruses switch to the lysogenic cycle when soil moisture is low and then are induced post wet up. These results also suggest that eDNA accumulates over the dry summer from deceased microbes and after the first rainfall, the eDNA fuels the soil community. Combining multiple meta-omics approaches, CO 2 measurements, and SIP allowed an unprecedented systems-level ecological characterization in these soils improving our understanding of how microbes and their viruses respond to different environmental conditions, and how virus ecogenomics and microbial processes affect the fate of organic carbon.