Data on litterfall production and meteorology at an old-growth tropical dry forest in northwestern Mexico

Chronological measurements of litterfall production can be used for understanding ecosystem dynamics such as net primary production and carbon cycling in highly seasonal ecosystems such as tropical dry forests (TDF). This paper presents data on litterfall production and meteorology in an old-growth TDF. The data was generated within the Monte Mojino Reserve located in the Sierra de Alamos – Rio Cuchujaqui Natural Protected Area in northwestern México. For litterfall collection, twenty randomly placed litterfall traps were installed to collect monthly litterfall production across four full growing seasons (48 monthly collections). Meteorological data were obtained from an automatic micrometeorological station that recorded data in situ from January 2013 to March 2019. The database includes litterfall production [g m−2 month−1], monthly rainfall [mm], air temperature [°C], relative humidity [%] and photosynthetic active radiation [µmol m−2 s−1].


a b s t r a c t
Chronological measurements of litterfall production can be used for understanding ecosystem dynamics such as net primary production and carbon cycling in highly seasonal ecosystems such as tropical dry forests (TDF). This paper presents data on litterfall production and meteorology in an old-growth TDF. The data was generated within the Monte Mojino Reserve located in the Sierra de Alamos -Rio Cuchujaqui Natural Protected Area in northwestern México. For litterfall collection, twenty randomly placed litterfall traps were installed to collect monthly litterfall production across four full growing seasons (48 monthly collections). Meteorological data were obtained from an automatic micrometeorological station that recorded data in situ from January 2013 to March 2019.  Table   Subject  Ecology  Specific subject area  Ecosystems ecology  Type of data  Tables  Figures  How data were acquired We generated litterfall data collecting litter from twenty 0.5 m-diameter litterfall traps made of synthetic mesh suspended at 75 cm from the ground. All traps were visited and cleaned every month between May and March of the following year. The meteorological data was acquired with the following instruments: rain gauge (TE525-L, Texas Electronics, Dallas, Texas, USA), a temperature and relative humidity probe (HMP45, Vaisala Inc., Helsinki, Finland) and a quantum Sensor (LI-COR, Lincoln, Nebraska, USA) to sense photosynthetic active radiation. All sensors were connected to a datalogger (CR30 0 0, Campbell Scientific, Logan, Utah, USA

Value of the Data
• Chronological measurements of litterfall production can be used for understanding ecosystem dynamics such as net primary production and carbon cycling in highly seasonal ecosystems such as tropical dry forests. • Intra-and interannual patterns of litterfall production can serve as a proxy for phenological changes in ecosystems to describe environmental controls on ecosystem processes. • Understanding environmental controls on litter production allow the generation and calibration of ecosystem process models and validation of remote sensing products. • Data on litterfall production across time can be used by scientists interested in comparing litterfall production across the continental distribution of the tropical dry forest in the Americas.
• Measurements of litter production should be valuable for long term ecological monitoring effort s in natural protected areas.

Data Description
The  a continuous time series of meteorological data from January 2013 to March 2019. Litterfall data were collected in an old-growth tropical dry forest, a highly seasonal ecosystem in the foothills of the Sierra Madre in northwestern Mexico [1] . The litterfall data included four full growing seasons that show the strong effects of the rainfall associated with the North American monsoon on the productivity of dry ecosystems. Meteorological data were collected with an automated system, mounted at 15 m height (about 2 meters above canopy). Environmental variables were automatically sampled every minute, and averaged to 30-minute periods by the datalogger. We then calculated the monthly amounts of precipitation [mm] and monthly means of air temperature [ °C], relative humidity [%] and photosynthetic active radiation [μmol m −2 s −1 ].
These data were collected to understand ecosystem phenological changes and dynamics of net primary production and how these are related to changes in environmental conditions. The dataset content is described in section 1.1 , variation of monthly litterfall production is presented in section 1.2 . In section 1.3 is presented the meteorological data.
The litterfall data lacks information in the 2014-2015 and the 2017-2018 growing seasons Fig. 1 . Table 1 .

Experimental design, materials and methods
Data on monthly litterfall production was acquired by installing twenty traps, randomly distributed across a study site with an area of 28.35 hectares. Traps were made of synthetic mesh with a diameter of 0.5 m and suspended 75 cm from the ground. Samples were collected by hand and placed in paper bags each month. Once in the laboratory, we removed insects and

Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships which have, or could be perceived to have, influenced the work reported in this article.

Supplementary materials
Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi: 10.1016/j.dib.2020.105723 .