Simulated tree recruitment at PA-BCI under four precipitation scenarios

Simulated recruitment rates into the 1 cm diameter at breast height size class are provided for four tropical tree plant functional types (PFTs) which vary in drought and shade tolerance, at Barro Colorado Island, Panama (PA-BCI). Recruitment rates are predicted using the Tree Recruitment Scheme (TRS; Hanbury-Brown et al., 2022), with parameters tuned to BCI, and model data output from the Ecosystem Demography model version 2 with hydrodynamics (ED2; Medvigy et al., 2009, Powell et al., 2018). Predictions of tree recruitment are provided under four precipitation scenarios: “BASE” = recycled 2008-2014 observed meteorology (Faybishenko & Paton, 2021), “SYN-ENSO” = two exceptionally strong El Niño events within 30 years (Powell et al., 2018), “WET” = 30% increase in precipitation compared to BASE, and DRY-DS = dry season (January–April) precipitation reduced by 75% compared to BASE. The dataset contains five CSV files; one for each precipitation scenario and one containing metadata. In addition to recruitment rates, these data contain TRS predictions of PFT-specific seed bank and seedling pool dynamics (tracked in units of carbon) and ED2's predictions of understory photosynthetically active radiation and soil matric potential at 6 cm of soil depth. These data are intended to be used to understand how the environmentally sensitive regeneration processes represented by the TRS a) help Vegetation Demographic Models capture observed variation in recruitment among PFTs and b) influence predictions of PFT-specific tree recruitment under varying precipitation scenarios. This dataset was originally published on the NGEE Tropics Archive and is being mirrored on ESS-DIVE for long-term archival Acknowledgement: Hanbury-Brown, A.R., Powell, T.L., Muller-Landau, H.C., Wright, S.J. and Kueppers, L.M. (2022), Simulating environmentally-sensitive tree recruitment in vegetation demographic models. New Phytol. https://doi.org/10.1111/nph.18059