Credit
We at TERN acknowledge the Traditional Owners and Custodians throughout Australia, New Zealand and all nations. We honour their profound connections to land, water, biodiversity and culture and pay our respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.
The data related to the 20 0.5-ha plots were established, maintained and censused by CSIRO (see https://doi.org/10.4225/08/59475c67be7a4 for initial link and data). We thank the Australian Supersite Network, part of the Australian Government’s Terrestrial Ecosystem Network for having provided the data for the Daintree Rainforest, Cow Bay, and Robson Creek Supersites. David Bauman was supported by the Belgian American Educational Foundation (BAEF) and the Philippe Wiener - Maurice Anspach Foundation.
Purpose
The data collected from the 20 plots provides an insight into the floristics, structure and long term forest dynamics of Australian tropical rainforests and allows direct comparisons to be made with long-term monitoring plots at a global scale.
Lineage
Data Creation
Site and species data:
The dataset encompasses 49 years of inventory data from 24 unlogged tropical rainforest plots distributed along an elevation gradient ranging between 15 and 1500 m above sea level in northern Queensland Australia. Twenty plots (0.5-ha, 100 × 50 m) were established between 1971 and 1980 to provide long-term ecological and demographic data, while four plots were established more recently (2001 – 2012) along the same elevation gradient. The elevation gradient covers a wide range of mean annual temperatures (19°C to 26.1°C), precipitation (1213 to 3563 mm), and mean vapour pressure deficit (6.5 to 11.8 hPa).
All trees above 10 cm diameter at breast height (DBH) were mapped, identified to species level and measured for diameter at beast height. Tree recruitment and mortality were also recorded. Sampling was conducted every two years for ten years, then at three-to-four-year intervals in the older twenty plots, while the more recent plots were sampled one to three times.
Climatic data:
Plot-level mean vapour pressure deficit (VPD), and maximum temperature (Tmax) were collected from ANUClimate v.2.0 between 1971 and 2019 and maximum climatological water deficit (MCWD) was calculated using precipitation data from ANUClimate v.2.0 and evapotranspiration data from TerraClimate. Climatic variable mean values were defined as a 35-year local average per climatic variable (1984-2019).
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