Data on environmental characteristics and plant abundances associated with trail segments on Barro Colorado Island, Panama, for 2000-2001

**Data Citation**

Please cite this dataset as

Svenning, J.-C., D. A. Kinner, R. F. Stallard, B. M. J. Engelbrecht, and S. J.
Wright. 2024. Data on environmental characteristics and plant abundances
associated with trail segments on Barro Colorado Island, Panama, for
2000-2001. Smithsonian Figshare. <https://doi.org/10.25573/data.25331362>

**_License and usage terms_**

This data is licensed as CC BY 4.0 and is thus freely available for reuse with
proper citation. We ask that data users share any resulting publications,
preprints, associated analysis code, and derived data products with us by
emailing Jens-Cristian Svenning at
[[e-mail]](mailto:[e-mail]). We are open to contributing
our expert knowledge of the study site and datasets to projects that use these
data; please direct queries regarding potential collaboration to Jens-Cristian
Svenning at [[e-mail]](mailto:[e-mail]).

**_Data description_**

This is a dataset on the abundances of particular plant taxa and on
environmental conditions on trail segments on Barro Colorado Island, Panama.
These data are associated with the following journal publication:

Svenning, J.-C., D. A. Kinner, R. F. Stallard, B. M. J. Engelbrecht, and S. J.
Wright. 2004. Ecological determinism in plant community structure across a
tropical forest landscape. _Ecology_ 85: 2526-2538.
<https://doi.org/10.1890/03-0396>

Additional online supplemental material for the article is available at the
following link:

<https://figshare.com/collections/ECOLOGICAL_DETERMINISM_IN_PLANT_COMMUNITY_STRUCTURE_ACROSS_A_TROPICAL_FOREST_LANDSCAPE/3298217>

**_Files included in this repository_****:**

**finaldata­_BCIdist_350p_5mb.txt** Tab-delimited text file version of the
full dataset.

**finaldata_BCIdist_350p_5mb_metadata.rtf** Rich text format file containing
the metadata including column definitions, methods details, and references.

**finaldata_BCIdist_350p_5mb_plus.xls** Excel file containing the full dataset
as the first worksheet, as well as column definitions, methods info, and
references in additional worksheets.

**_Column definitions for the dataset_****:**

_Column names_ ___definitions (see methods for details)_

trail_code code for the relevant trail segment on BCI and letters indicate the
trail, the numbers give the start and end of the trail section; for example,
AHC_0102 indicates trail AHC between markers 1 and 2.

Segment length The length of the trail segment in meters

numGAP123 Gaps in the canopy were measured with the following ordinal index:
0, no large overhead or lateral gaps; 1, either exposed to very large lateral
gap or 1–4 m of the trail exposed to the sky directly overhead as part of a
major gap; or 2, >=5 m of the trail exposed to the sky directly overhead and
opening part of major gap (July–August 2000).

Stream Stream presence/absence was determined by streams crossing the trail
and estimated to flow throughout the wet season

Mean %water(DW) Soil moisture was determined by collecting samples of the
upper 10 cm of the soil using standard soil corers during the late dry season
(28 March–3 April 2001).

for3cat 12 Percentage of area in old-growth forest, as quantified by the
darkest of three grey-scale class in a 1927 aerial photo.

for3cat 45 Percentage of area in shorter secondary forest, as quantified by
the lightest of three grey-scale classes in a 1927 aerial photo.

Mean Slope Mean slope (maximum rate of change in elevation ["] between a 1-m2
cell and its eight neighbors; the variable used was the mean over all 1-m2
cells in a given trail segment).

Mean lna/tanb Hydrologic index (log[A/tan (Beta)]) represents topographic
runoff potential of a stratified soil.

Mean soil type The trail segment mean soil type for its 1-m2 cells, each
assigned 1 or 2 according to soil type.

Lith 1 Percentage of area in lithology 1 (Basalt/andesite flows).

Lith3 Percentage of area in lithology 3 (Caimito Volcanic).

Lith4 Percentage of area in lithology 4 (Caimito Marine).

ln_dist_shore Natural-log-transformed distance to shore, in meters. Mean
distance between the GIS cells of a trail segment and the lake edge.

Y centered N-S geographical coordinates

Y2 Y squared

Y3 Y cubed

X Centered E-W geographical coordinates

XY The product of X and Y

XY2 The product of X and Y squared

X2 X squared

X2Y The product of X squared and Y

X3 X cubed

All further columns are abundances of particular plant taxa along the relevant
trail segment

Full taxonomic names are given in

<https://wiley.figshare.com/articles/dataset/Appendix_A_A_total_species_list_including_family_growth_form_and_voucher_number_/3523688>

** _Acknowledgments_**

We thank Sebastian Bernal for doing most of the woody plant inventory, Maria
del Carmen Ruiz and David Galvéz for soil sampling and processing, and Andrés
Hernandez, Osvaldo Calderón, Rolando Pérez, and Salomon Aguilar for taxonomic
help. We acknowledge economic support from The Carlsberg Foundation (grants
990086/20 and 990576/20 to J.-C. Svenning), The Danish Natural Science
Research Council (grants 9901835, 51-00-0138, and 21-01-0415 to J.-C.
Svenning), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (to S. J. Wright and B. M. J.
Engelbrecht), the U.S. Geological Survey WEBB Project, and the Smithsonian
Terrestrial Environmental Sciences Program. All GIS analyses were completed at
the Environmental Imaging and Computation Facility at the University of
Colorado.

**_References_**

As of the date of this data publication (2024), these data have been used for
the following publications:

Svenning, J.-C., D. A. Kinner, R. F. Stallard, B. M. J. Engelbrecht, and S. J.
Wright. 2004. Ecological determinism in plant community structure across a
tropical forest landscape. _Ecology_ 85: 2526-2538.
<https://doi.org/10.1890/03-0396>

Svenning, J.-C., B. M. J. Engelbrecht, D. A. Kinner, T. A. Kursar, R. F.
Stallard, and S. J. Wright. 2006. The relative roles of environment, history
and local dispersal in controlling the distributions of common tree and shrub
species in a tropical forest landscape, Panama. _Journal Of Tropical Ecology_
22: 575-586. <https://doi.org/10.1017/s0266467406003348>

Muller-Landau, H. C., and J.-C. Svenning. 2024. An Introduction to Landscape-
Level Variation Across the Barro Colorado Nature Monument. Chapter 2 in _The
First 100 Years of Research on Barro Colorado: Plant and Ecosystem Science_ ,
ed. H. C. Muller-Landau and S. J. Wright. Smithsonian Institution Scholarly
Press.

R code for reproducing the analyses in Muller-Landau and Svenning 2024 is
published at

Muller-Landau, H.C. and J.-C. Svenning. 2024. Chapter 02 - An Introduction to
Landscape-level variation across the Barro Colorado Nature Monument - Appendix
S1 - R code and data files to construct Figure 2.Smithsonian Figshare.
<https://doi.org/10.25573/data.22779260>