Abundance of trees and seedlings, climatic, and soil variables in 36 20x20 m permanent plots in peri-urban Andean forests of Colombia

The study was conducted on the Eastern Andean Cordillera of Colombia, in remnant forests occurring in the high-plain where Bogotá lies, one of the largest cities in Latin America. The high-plain covers an area of ​​about 185,000 ha at an average altitude of 2600 meters above sea level (m a.s.l.). We selected six study sites, distributed in the Eastern and Western slopes of the mountain range that surrounds the high-plain, which exhibit different climatic and edaphic characteristics. Five of the sites were located in the suburban municipalities of Soacha (So), San Francisco (Sf), Guasca (Gu), Tabio (Ta), and the last one, Torca (To), located in a large forest fragment at the periphery of Bogotá. Sites were selected so that they encompassed both early- and late-successional or old-growth forest patches. 
Within each site, we established three 20 m x 20 m plots in early-successional forests (E) and three 20 m x 20 m plots in late-successional (L) for a total of 36 permanent plots. Here, w...