Biomass production of tropical trees across space and time: The shifting roles of diameter growth and wood density

Woody biomass in tropical trees contributes significantly to global carbon stocks; however, these stocks are increasingly affected by climate and land-use changes. Understanding the growth mechanisms driving woody biomass production is essential for assessing the short- and long-term contributions to carbon stocks and dynamics in tropical forests. Trees accumulate biomass by increasing their size (wood volume) and/or tissue density (wood density). However, estimates of tree biomass production are often based solely on size increment through measurements of stem diameter growth, overlooking the potential spatial and temporal variation in wood density within trees. Tree-ring analysis can be applied to reconstruct past tree volume growth and wood density variations, allowing the quantification of their relative contributions when reconstructing past woody biomass production. Here, we studied trees of the widespread Neotropical genus Cedrela (C. fissilis, C. odorata, and C. montana) along a..., Sample collection
Samples were collected from eighteen forest sites across Brazil and Peru, covering a range of forest types and environmental characteristics. The study sites included national, state, and municipal parks and private forests located in tropical and subtropical regions. These sites represent ecosystems from the Amazon Rainforest, Atlantic Forest, Brazilian Cerrado savanna, and Caatinga dry forest. Samples from sites in the Amazon were collected in sustainable-use conservation units (National and State Forests), where legal forest management operations are conducted. In these areas, samples were obtained by collecting cross-sectional wedges from felled trees as part of authorized logging activities. In the remaining areas, samples were collected from state, municipal, and private forests where forest management is not legally authorized. In these cases, non-destructive coring methods were used to extract wood samples. Each population was sampled in different years for var..., # Data from: Biomass production of tropical trees across space and time: The shifting roles of diameter growth and wood density

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.1g1jwsv9b](10.5061/dryad.1g1jwsv9b)

## Description of the data and file structure

This dataset was collected as part of a study on trees of the widespread Neotropical genus *Cedrela* (*C. fissilis*, *C. odorata*, and *C. montana*), sampled across eighteen sites spanning diverse biomes, including the Amazon rainforest, Atlantic Forest, Cerrado savanna, and Caatinga dry forest. The research aimed to address two main questions:

1\) How does temporal variation in tree diameter growth and wood density affect biomass production?

2\) To what extent do these relationships vary along the environmental gradient?

To answer these questions, we measured both long-term (ontogenetic, from pith to bark) and short-term (annual to interannual) variations in diameter growth and wood density. Biomass estimates were derived using the pantropical al...,