Coarse particulate organic matter from streams in the Bisley Experimental Watersheds, Puerto Rico

Leaf litter is an important energy source for aquatic food webs and biogeochemical cycles. As leaf litter from the riparian zone enters streams it slowly starts to break down and transform into course particulate organic matter (CPOM). While CPOM has been extensively explored in temperate regions, many questions remain in tropical rain forests about patterns, timing, and magnitudes of inputs. Here we present 30-years of continuous CPOM data collected in two streams of the Bisley Experimental Watersheds (BEW) in the Luquillo Experimental Forest in northeastern Puerto Rico. We report CPOM as litterflow, which is all the material derived from multiple sources (i.e., canopy, riparian zone, and upstream) and conditions that is transported with flow and collected at fixed locations in the streams. The BEW CPOM data provides a view into the inherent connection between terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems to better understand how organic material can move through the landscape to be exported in streams and transported downriver to sustain the food webs of receiving bodies of water.