Non-growing/growing season non-uniform-warming increases precipitation use efficiency but reduces its temporal stability in an alpine meadow.

There are still uncertainties on the impacts of season-non-uniform-warming on plant precipitation use efficiency (PUE) and its temporal stability (PUE) in alpine areas. Here, we examined the changes of PUE and PUE under two scenes of non-growing/growing season non-uniform-warming (i.e., GLNG: growing-season-warming lower than non-growing-season-warming; GHNG: growing-season-warming higher than non-growing-season-warming) based on a five-year non-uniform-warming of non-growing/growing season experiment. The GLNG treatment increased PUE by 38.70% and reduced PUE by 50.47%, but the GHNG treatment did not change PUE and PUE. This finding was mainly due to the fact that the GLNG treatment had stronger influences on aboveground biomass (AGB), non-growing-season soil moisture (SM), temporal stability of AGB (AGB), temporal stability of non-growing-season air temperature ( ), temporal stability of growing-season vapor pressure deficit (VPD) and temporal stability of start of growing-season (SGS). Therefore, the warming scene with a higher non-growing-season-warming can have greater influences on PUE and PUE than the warming scene with a higher growing-season-warming, and there were possibly trade-offs between plant PUE and PUE under season-non-uniform-warming scenes in the alpine meadow.