Long-term seedling and small sapling census data from the Barro Colorado Island 50 ha Forest Dynamics Plot, Panama

Tropical forests are well known for their high woody plant diversity.
Processes occurring at early life stages are thought to play a critical
role in maintaining this high diversity and shaping the composition of
tropical tree communities. To evaluate hypothesized mechanisms promoting
tropical tree species coexistence and influencing composition, we
initiated a census of woody seedlings and small saplings in the permanent
50-ha Forest Dynamics Plot (FDP) on Barro Colorado Island (BCI), Panama.
Situated in old-growth, lowland tropical moist forest, the BCI FDP was
originally established in 1980 to monitor trees and shrubs ≥1 cm diameter
at 1.3 m above ground (dbh) at ca. 5-yr intervals. However, critical data
on the dynamics occurring at earlier life stages were initially lacking.
Therefore, in 2001 we established a 1-m2 seedling plot in the center of
every 5 x 5 m section of the BCI FDP. All freestanding woody individuals
≥20 cm tall and <1 cm dbh (hereafter referred to as seedlings) were
tagged, mapped, measured, and identified to species in 19,313 1-m2
seedling plots. Because seedling dynamics are rapid, we censused these
seedling plots every 1–2 years. Here we present data from the 14 censuses
of these seedling plots conducted between the initial census in 2001 to
the most recent census, in 2018. This data set includes nearly 1M
observations of ~185,000 individuals of >400 tree, shrub, and liana
species. These data will permit spatially-explicit analyses of seedling
distributions, recruitment, growth, and survival for hundreds of woody
plant species. In addition, the data presented here can be linked to
openly-available, long-term data on the dynamics of trees and shrubs ≥1cm
dbh in the BCI FDP, as well as existing data sets from the site on
climate, canopy structure, phylogenetic relatedness, functional traits,
soil nutrients, and topography.