Observed phenological indicators and environmental drivers at global change experiments at the Jornada Basin LTER site, 2014-2020

This dataset contains plant phenological data extracted from
phenocams installed at a global exchange experiment involving
Chihuahuan desert plant communities at the Jornada Basin LTER site
in southern New Mexico, U.S.A. Cycles of plant growth, termed
phenology, are tightly linked to environmental controls, and our
overarching objective in this study is to determine if temperature
or precipitation are relatively more important for determining shrub
and grass greenup date (start of season) and senescence date (end of
season). At these camera locations, we experimentally manipulated
incoming precipitation at the Jornada Basin LTER for over a decade
and recorded plant leaf phenology at the daily scale for seven years
using phenocams. The data here are derived from raw
"phenocam" camera data collected at two ongoing studies at
the Jornada Basin LTER site, one studying ecosystem responses to
long term changes in water and nitrogen availability, and one
studying plant productivity and partitioning responses to water
availability and herbivory (studies 349 and 456, respectively).
Phenocams at the sites have collected images since 2014, and basic
color and greenness data extracted from those images are available
in a companion dataset on EDI (knb-lter-jrn.210574001). This dataset
includes the derived annual and quarterly phenological indices and
greenness indices for each plot monitored by phenocams, and
temperature and precipitation variables aggregated to the same
frequency. The dataset also includes R code and input files used to
generate these derived data. See Currier and Sala 2022 for more
details. This study is ongoing.