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.