National forest inventory data for a size-structured forest population model

In forest communities, light competition is a key process for community assembly. Species' differences in seedling and sapling tolerance to shade cast by overstory trees is thought to determine species composition at late-successional stages. Most forests are distant from these late-successional equilibria, impeding a formal evaluation of their potential species composition. To extrapolate competitive equilibria from short-term data, we therefore introduce the JAB model, a parsimonious dynamic model with interacting size-structured populations, which focuses on sapling demography including the tolerance to overstory competition. We apply the JAB model to a two-\"species\" system from temperate European forests, i.e. the shade-tolerant species Fagus sylvatica L. and the group of all other competing species. Using Bayesian calibration with prior information from external Slovakian national forest inventory (NFI) data, we fit the JAB model to short timeseries from the German NFI. We use the ..., The data set is a curation of the German and the Slovakian NFIs., R programming language and environment is needed to access the files.