Expanding tropical forest monitoring into Dry Forests: The DRYFLOR protocol for permanent plots

Abstract

Long-term forest plots are sites where all trees above a specified diameter are numbered, identified, and measured, and where repeated censuses record growth, mortality, and recruitment. Such plots have become widespread in tropical rain forests, exemplified by networks such as RAINFOR (Amazon Forest Inventory Network; Malhi et al., 2002), AfriTRON (African Tropical Rainforest Observation Network; Lewis et al., 2009), T-FORCES (Tropical Forests in the Changing Earth System; Qie et al., 2017), and CTFSforestGEO (Center for Tropical Forest Science-Forest Global Earth Observatory; Anderson-Teixeira et al., 2014). The RAINFOR,