Tree demographic strategies largely overlap across succession in Neotropical wet and dry forest communities

Secondary tropical forests play an increasingly important role in carbon budgets and biodiversity conservation. Understanding successional trajectories is therefore imperative for guiding forest restoration and climate change mitigation efforts. Forest succession is driven by the demographic strategies – combinations of growth, mortality, and recruitment rates – of the tree species in the community. However, our understanding of demographic diversity in tropical tree species stems almost exclusively from old-growth forests. Here, we assembled demographic information from repeated forest inventories along chronosequences in two wet (Costa Rica, Panama) and two dry (Mexico) Neotropical forests to assess whether the ranges of demographic strategies present in a community shift across succession. We calculated demographic rates for >500 tree species while controlling for canopy status to compare demographic diversity (i.e. the ranges of demographic strategies) in early successional (0-30..., , , # Tree demographic strategies largely overlap across succession in Neotropical wet and dry forest communities

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.f7m0cfz4h](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.f7m0cfz4h)

This dataset contains all data and R scripts to reproduce the results and figures from Schorn et al. (in revision): \"Tree demographic strategies largely overlap across succession in Neotropical wet and dry forest communities\", *Ecology.*

Necessary data like demographic rates for all species in the studied sites are stored in the data folder. Some results needed to produce the figures are already stored in the results folder, but can be independently reproduced in the scripts 01_hypervolumes.R and 02_bootstrap_rarefaction.R. All scripts are stored in the scripts folder.

## Description of the data and file structure

#### demographic\_rates\_site.txt

Contains growth, survival, and recruitment rates for all species in all successional stages per site. Needed to compute the hypervolumes and to pr...