Common Stand Exam-based Ecological Monitoring Data from New Mexico Uplands, 2007-present

The present package is a collection of the available quality-controlled data collected during the New Mexico Forest and Watershed Restoration Institute's (NMFWRI) summer Uplands field season. We term our data as such as it is gathered in the montane upland areas of northern New Mexico, which covers pinion-juniper habitat through alpine wet mixed-conifer forests. A variation of the Common Stand Exam methodology is used to collect data, including aerial and ground cover ocular estimates, canopy density using spherical densiometers, tree regeneration, mature tree measurements, and fuel load estimates using Brown's transects. Data was collected from 2007 until the present. The Institute collects monitoring data because of the USFS Collaborative Forest Restoration Program (CFRP), a now defunct grant program which funded forest restoration projects in New Mexico occurring on Federal, Tribal, State, County or Municipal forest land. This effort specifically funded projects that sought to meet any of the following objectives: Wildfire threat reduction, Ecosystem restoration, including non-native species reduction, Reestablishment of historic fires regimes, Reforestation, Preservation of old and large trees, Small diameter tree utilization, and Creation of forest-related local employment. Even though the CFRP has ended, we continue to maintain and improve on nearly 20-year's worth of data to provide a public repository of forest data to help land managers in New Mexico to better manage fire-adapted forests -- a requirement set forth by the Southwest Forest Health and Wildfire Prevention Act of 2004, the NMFWRI's founding legislation. Completeness and accuracy of data is variable based by year, but increases with recency and efforts have been made to ameliorate older data. The Institute both collects additional data each year and presently quality-controls archival data; as such, the data package will be updated quarterly until the data is up-to-date and will be updated yearly thereafter to account for summer field season. The data provided to EDI is in the form of CSV files, but represents data stored in a relational database. Connecting tables together is not necessary to use the data, but additional information can be provided by the Data Manager if desired. Said database is hosted on both a server on NMHU's campus and an Azure database, which are both regularly backed up. Until our full dataset is available via NMFWRI's website, additional data can be provided between updates on an ad hoc basis, if available.