Collection of datasets: Strong temporal variation in treefall and branchfall rates in a tropical forest is related to extreme rainfall: results from 5 years of monthly drone data for a 50-ha plot

Collection of three datasets used in the following peer-reviewed journal article:

The three datasets are (1) orthomosaics, (2) surface elevation and canopy height change models, and (3) shapefiles of canopy disturbances of the 50-ha Smithsonian ForestGEO plot on Barro Colorado Island, Panama for 47 dates from 2 October 2014 to 28 November 2019. The individual datasets contain detailed metadata.

Author contribution for datasets for 2014-2015: Helene C. Muller-Landau conceived the research, wrote the grant proposal that funded the research, and designed data collection. Jonathan Dandois constructed the drones, led drone data collection, performed photogrammetry processing, and did preliminary horizontal alignment. Samuel Grubinger finalized horizontal and vertical alignment and identified canopy disturbances. Raquel F. Araujo revised canopy disturbances and classified them as branchfalls, treefalls, or standing dead trees.

Acknowledgments: We thank Marino Ramirez, Pablo Ramos, Paulino Villareal and others for assistance with drone data collection; and Milton Solano for assistance with data processing and organization. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Smithsonian Institution Competitive Grants Program for Science; the Next Generation Ecosystem Experiments-Tropics, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research; and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute fellowship program. Kristina Anderson-Teixeira, Stephanie Bolman, Richard Condit, Stuart Davies, Matteo Detto, Jefferson Hall, Patrick Jansen, Stefan Schnitzer, Edmund Tanner, and S. Joseph Wright were co-PIs on the original Smithsonian proposal, and we thank them for their contributions to the proposal and input on the research.