Dry season soil water potential maps of a 50 hectare tropical forest plot on Barro Colorado Island, Panama

Stefan J Kupers,Bettina M J Engelbrecht,Christian Wirth,Nadja Rüger

doi:10.1038/s41597-019-0072-z

Abstract

Fine scale spatial variation in soil moisture influences plant performance, species distributions and diversity. However, detailed information on local soil moisture variation is scarce, particularly in species-rich tropical forests. We measured soil water potential and soil water content in the 50-ha Forest Dynamics Plot on Barro Colorado Island (BCI), Panama, one of the best-studied tropical forests in the world. We present maps of soil water potential for several dry season stages during a regular year and during an El Niño drought. Additionally, we provide code that allows users to create maps for specific dates. The maps can be combined with other freely available datasets such as long-term vegetation censuses (ranging from seeds to adult trees), data on other resources (e.g. light and nutrients) and remote sensing data (e.g. LiDAR and imaging spectroscopy). Users can study questions in various disciplines such as population and community ecology, plant physiology and hydrology under current and future climate conditions.

Highlights

Background & SummaryWater is an essential resource for plants and is crucial for numerous plant functions[1]
Water availability strongly influences plant performance, species distributions, functional composition and ecosystem functioning across biomes[2,3,4,5,6]
Understanding how local soil moisture variation affects plants will become increasingly important, given the predicted shifts in rainfall patterns caused by climate change and their expected effects on plant performance, community composition and species distributions[2,4,11]

Summary

Introduction

Background & SummaryWater is an essential resource for plants and is crucial for numerous plant functions[1]. We measured dry-season soil water potential and soil water content across a 50-ha Forest Dynamics Plot on Barro Colorado Island, Panama (Fig. 1). We used Random Forests[30] to model spatial variation in soil water potential across the 50-ha plot on a 5 m resolution during various stages of the dry season, using soil monitoring data to quantify drought intensity, as well as topographic and edaphic information and data from a tree census (see Table 1).

Results

Conclusion