David B. Clark and Deborah A. Clark. 2012. Annual tree growth, mortality, physical condition, and microsite in an old-growth tropical rain forest, 1983–2010. Ecology 93:213.

Data Paper

Ecological Archives E093-019-D1.

Copyright

Authors
Data Files
Abstract
Metadata

Author(s)

David B. Clark
Department of Biology
University of Missouri
St. Louis, Missouri 80907
USA
E-mail: dbclark50@yahoo.com

Deborah A. Clark
Department of Biology
University of Missouri
St. Louis, Missouri 80907
USA and
1384 Lindenwood Grove
Colorado Springs, Colorado 80907
USA

Data Files

The zip file contains the entire data set as a single downloadable archive. All files contain 4028 records, including an initial header row and 4027 data records, and each is in tab-delimited ASCII text format.

Clark_tropical_trees_1983_2010.zip
Crown_positions_1983_2010.txt
Crowns_above_1983_2010.txt
Dates_1983_2010.txt
Diameter_1983_2010.txt
Diameter_growth_1983_2010.txt
Habitats_1983_2010.txt
Heights_1983_2010.txt
Height_growth_1983_2010.txt
How_measured_1983_2010.txt
Location_descriptions_1983_2010.txt
POM_heights_1983_2010.txt
Stem_condition_1983_2010.txt

Abstract

Tree species richness in tropical rain forest typically exceeds several hundred species over mesoscale landscapes. There is no generally accepted ecological theory that accounts for the coexistence of so many species with the same general morphologies and the same basic requirements of light, nutrients, water, and physical space. In part this lack of theory rests on the lack of understanding of the post-establishment ecology for the vast majority of tropical tree species. Of even more immediate concern is the lack of data on tree performance in relation to climate; such data are critical to project effects of global climate change on tropical forests.

Here we present data on the post-establishment ecology of 10 species of tropical wet forest trees selected to span a range of predicted life history patterns. The study site was terra firme old-growth tropical wet forest at the La Selva Biological Station in Costa Rica. Particular emphasis has been placed on evaluating the precision of measurements, metadata development, and annual measurements of all individuals; the annual time step is a temporal interval that captures the scale of climate and microhabitat variations and the responses of trees to this variation in tropical rain forest.

We present data on survivorship, growth, and microhabitat for 4027 individuals from established seedling to canopy-level individuals measured annually between 1983 and 2010 (the study is ongoing and complete through 2011), thus adding 10 years’ data and >600 new individuals to the data set published in Ecological Archives in 2006. The data set is unique in its scope (number of years of continuous annual measurements, number of monitored individuals) as well as in the degree of metadata documentation and unrestricted access to the raw data (data sets published in 2000, 2006, this paper). The data have been used to study life history patterns, relations with microhabitats including edaphic factors and crown light environments, relations among ecophysiology, morphology, and performance, the relation of tree performance to climate variation both at local and global scales, and in a variety of remote-sensing studies.

Key words: Costa Rica; emergents; global change; La Selva; life history strategies; physical damage; tree demography; tropical rain forest; tropical trees.