Anthropogenic nitrogen (N) deposition is an important component of global change and threatens terrestrialbiodiversity. Most previous studies of the consequences of N deposition have focused on plant community re sponses and found that N deposition decreases plant diversity. However, the effffects of N deposition on soilbiodiversity and belowground biotic interactions remain poorly understood. We explored the changes in mainsoil food web components (microbes, nematodes, springtails, and mites) in response to elevated N deposition(60 kg N ha−1yr−1, starting from 2012 to 2014), and whether these changes are altered by the presence of plants(planting of shrubs in 2008) in a two-factorial fifield mesocosm experiment with 16 equally-sized plots (1 × 2 m).Our results showed that elevated N deposition negatively affffected soil bacteria, while fungi showed ratherneutral responses. Specififically, N deposition decreased bacteria Shannon's diversity index H′, richness, observedspecies abundance, bacterial activity, and resulted in a non-signifificant decrease of the relative abundance of rarebacterial taxa. By contrast, for fungi, only a non-signifificant decrease of richness was observed with N deposition.Importantly, those N deposition effffects mostly occurred in the absence of planted shrubs. Moreover, shrubpresence and N deposition also interactively affffected the diversity of soil invertebrates, i.e., N deposition hadlittle effffect on them in the absence of planted shrubs, but resulted in an increase or a non-signifificant increase ofsoil invertebrate diversity in the presence of planted shrubs. Furthermore, N deposition did not affffect the bio mass/density of any soil food web component and biomass/density ratios related to soil food web structureregardless of absence or presence of planted shrubs; these indices were only affffected by the presence of shrubs.Overall, these dissimilar responses of the diversity of soil microorganisms and animals to elevated N depositionindicate that plants are important mediators of N deposition effffects on soil biodiversity. Thus, the present resultsmay imply that an intact plant cover may mitigate detrimental N deposition effffects on soil biodiversity.