High-resolution tropical rain-forest canopy climate data

Abstract

Canopy habitats challenge researchers with their intrinsically difficult access. The current scarcity of climatic data from forest canopies limits our understanding of the conditions and environmental variability of these diverse and dynamic habitats. We present 307 days of climate records collected between 2019 and 2020 in the tropical rainforest canopy of the Yasuní National Park, Ecuador. We monitored climate with a 10-min temporal resolution in the middle crowns of eight canopy trees. The distance between canopy climate stations ranged from 700 m to 10 km. Apart from air temperature, relative humidity, leaf wetness, and photosynthetically active radiation (PAR), measured in each canopy climate station, global radiation, rainfall, and wind speed were measured in different subsets of them. We processed the eight data series to omit erroneous records resulting from sensor failures or lack of the solar-based power supply. In addition to the eight original data series, we present three derived data series, two aggregating canopy climate for valleys or for ridges (from four stations each), and one overall average (from the eight stations). This last derived data series contains 306 days, while the shortest of the original data series covers 22 days and the longest 296 days. In addition to the data, two open-source tools, developed in RStudio, are presented that facilitate data visualization (a dashboard) and data exploration (a filtering app) of the original and aggregated records.

Keywords

• Amazon forest
• canopy climate
• Ecuador
• tree crowns
• Yasuní National Park