Gallery and spiny forest tree species inventory in Berenty Reserve, Madagascar

Madagascar's unique dry forests, particularly gallery and spiny forests, face severe threats and are significantly understudied, leaving only a fraction of the original extent intact. Thus, there is a critical need for characterizing, conserving, and restoring this diverse forest ecosystem. Conducting extensive floristic surveys and environmental analyses, we investigated structural and compositional differences between the gallery and spiny forests, as well as within distinct gallery forest sites in Berenty Reserve in the south of the island. We also evaluated differences in habitat quality between the spiny and gallery forests for three species of diurnal lemurs in the reserve, and analyzed the current population trend of the tamarind trees, a species of ecological and cultural importance in Madagascar. Our findings revealed that the spiny and gallery forests differed in composition and structure, confirming the unique ecological characteristics of gallery forests and the underexplore..., This data was collected in the private Berenty Reserve (24°58'60''S, 46°16'60''E) in Madagascar. We established 34 0.1 ha (20 x 50 m) plots in the gallery forest and 6 0.1 ha plots in the spiny forest. Floristic surveys were conducted from June to August 2018 and 2019. In each plot we counted, identified, and measured all the trees that met one of two criteria: a) they had a diameter at breast height (DBH) ≥ 10 cm (i.e., 1.3 m from ground level), or b) they had multiple branches below 1.3 m, whose cumulative stem diameters summed to ≥ 10 cm., , # Data of paper: \"Structural and Compositional Differences in Gallery and Spiny Forests of Southern Madagascar: Implications for Conservation of Lemur and Tree Species\"

\[Access this dataset on Dryad](Dataset DOI link)

## Description of the data and file structure

This csv file contains the data of the forest inventory conducted in Berenty Reserve over the period of 2018-2019. The data contains information about the species present in each forest plot, and measurements of their height, canopy, and circumference, as well as the calculated values for diameter at breast height and basal area. Each of the variables found in the file are detailed below:

1. Forest_type: Forest cover type where the plots were located. These include Spiny forest or Gallery forest.
2. Forest: Name given to the particular forest area in the Berenty Reserve. Each forest in the reserve is locally identified with a specific name.
3. Plot: plot identifier consisting in a combination of letters and numbers
4....