2.3 Climate data
Plant phenology and aboveground community biomass in the study region
have been found to be affected by growing season (May-September) and
winter precipitation (January-April) as well as fluctuations in
temperature and precipitation during the growing season (Bai et al.,
2004; Li et al., 2015; Li et al., 2019; Zhang et al., 2020). So, the
meteorological data for the present study were divided into the
following meteorological variables. Hence, we used 60 meteorological
variables: (1) monthly mean temperature (Tmonth) and
monthly precipitation (Pmonth) for January to September
(i.e., 9 + 9 variables), (2) mean temperature and precipitation for all
possible two- to nine-month periods between January and September
(Tmonth-month, Pmonth-month) (21 + 21
variables).