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).