Data from: Chronic disturbance and climate water deficit shift tropical evergreen tree communities to deciduous in the Western Ghats

Moist tropical forests in India’s Western Ghats face a dual threat from increasingly erratic precipitation (and consequent water stress), and an intensifying anthropogenic footprint. To this end, we examined whether and how disturbance history modulates relationships of forest composition with climate. We conducted the study in the northern Western Ghats of Maharashtra, India. We sampled 120 tree plots (0.05 ha each) across forests with varying histories of biomass extraction and a gradient in climate water deficit (a proxy for water stress) within a 15,000 km2 landscape. The dataset collected and R codes used for this study are published here. The climatic water deficit (CWD) data were derived from Chave et al. (2014). https://jeromechave.github.io/pantropical_allometry.htm#CWD Geographic Coverage: South-western part of Maharashtra in India (15.72–17.74°N; 73.29–74.19°E)Taxonomic Coverage: 7,001 individual trees belonging to 192 speciesTemporal Coverage: October 2022 - March 2023 The dataset contains two csv files and two R codes and a ReadMe_vegetation.txt file.