Barro Colorado Forest Census Plot Data, Panama

2019 Version

R. Condit, S. Lao, R. Pérez, S.B. Dolins, R.B. Foster, S.P. Hubbell

The 50-hectare plot at Barro Colorado Island, Panama, is a 1000 meter by 500 meter rectangle of forest inside of which all woody trees and shrubs with stems at least 1 cm in stem diameter have been censused. Every individual tree in the 50 hectares was permanently numbered with an aluminum tag in 1982, and every individual has been revisited six times since (in 1985, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005, 2010, and 2015). Data from all eight censuses, including 423,617 individual trees and 2.45 million diameter measurements, are available as a DataONE Dash archive (https://doi.org/10.15146/5xcp-0d46). This is the original version of the data as collected and organized by the scientists responsible for all the work; many web sites offer subsets of the data for educational purposes, but alternative web sites are likely to be incomplete and the authors cannot vouch for their accuracy. Data are available in several format, most conveniently in tables in the programming language R (called CTFS R Analytical Tables), along with documentation covering details of data formatting.

Please cite the database as

Condit, R., S. Lao, R. Pérez, S. Aguilar, R.B. Foster, S.P. Hubbell. (2019). Complete data from the Barro Colorado 50-ha plot: 423617 trees, 35 years, v3, DataONE Dash, Dataset, https://doi.org/10.15146/5xcp-0d46.

Original publications describing the database are cited at the archive, and details on the database contents are provided there. A companion database covering taxonomy of all tree species in the 50-ha plot is archived as Condit et al. (2019) [BCI 50-ha Plot Taxonomy, v4, DataONE Dash, Dataset, https://doi.org/10.15146/R3FH61].