Africa MATRIX: Forest Demographic Models and Projections for Africa

Africa MATRIX is a forest demographic modeling framework providing processed datasets and trained Random Forest models for mortality, upgrowth, and recruitment. The deposit includes validation outputs and climate covariates for long-term forest projections from 2010 to 2100 under SSP climate scenarios. Desmond Mensah from Purdue University created this resource to support reproduction of the associated manuscript's results.

Use Cases

• Reproducing demographic rate estimations (mortality, upgrowth, recruitment) based on the provided Random Forest model objects.
• Conducting long-term forest structure projections under SSP1-2.6 and SSP5-8.5 climate scenarios using the included climate covariates.
• Validating forest demographic models using the provided cross-validation and forward simulation outputs.
• Analyzing species-group and DBH-class abundance matrices for insights into forest structural dynamics.

Strengths

• Includes serialized Random Forest model objects with tuned hyperparameters for three key demographic processes.
• Provides climate time series data for two distinct future climate forcing scenarios (SSP1-2.6 and SSP5-8.5).
• Supports validation through both 5-fold cross-validation and forward simulation from Inventory 1 to Inventory 2.
• Released under the permissive Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and dataset scale are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• The complete preprocessing and analysis scripts are stored in a separate GitHub repository, requiring additional steps for full reproducibility.

Provenance

Source

Desmond Mensah, Department of Forestry and Natural Resources, Purdue University.

Collection Method

Processed from forest inventory data and climate covariates, with models trained using Random Forests in R.

Time Range

Projection simulations cover 2010–2100.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-12 17:49:19; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Africa, with analysis across different biomes.