Hurricane Otto in 2016 provided Costa Rica's first hurricane in decades, creating a natural experiment. This dataset, authored by Natalie Westwood, likely contains measurements of invertebrate diversity, abundance, and composition in aquatic treeholes, contrasting hurricane-generated forest gaps with litter from intact versus fragmented forests. Litter decomposition rates are also likely included.
Use Cases
- Modeling community resistance to disturbance based on invertebrate diversity and abundance metrics.
- Analyzing the effect of litter origin on decomposition rates in aquatic ecosystems.
- Comparing the relative impact of hurricane gap formation versus forest fragmentation on microhabitat communities.
Strengths
- Focuses on a specific, novel disturbance event: Hurricane Otto in 2016.
- Examines a controlled comparison between hurricane gaps and litter origin effects.
- Likely contains paired measurements of biological communities and ecosystem function (decomposition).
Limitations
- Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.
- Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
- Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
Provenance
- Source
- Borealis Harvested Dataverse
- Collection Method
- Likely field observations and experimental measurements from treehole ecosystems in Costa Rica.
- Time Range
- Centered around 2016.
- Freshness
- Last updated 2026-06-13 04:10:41; freshness should be verified.
- Geography
- Costa Rica.