Forest Litterfall Mass Data From Brazilian Amazon

Forty mesh traps collected litterfall every two weeks for five years in an old-growth upland forest in Brazil's Tapajos National Forest. The dataset reports the mean and standard error of mass for sorted components like leaves, fruits, flowers, wood, and miscellaneous material, converted to Mg/ha/yr. It was produced by NASA as part of the LBA-ECO project.

Use Cases

• Modeling carbon and nutrient fluxes in Amazonian forests using litter mass columns.
• Analyzing seasonal and interannual patterns in forest productivity via time-series litterfall data.
• Calibrating remote sensing estimates of biomass turnover with ground-truthed litter component data.
• Studying the partitioning of above-ground net primary production into leaves, reproductive material, and wood.

Strengths

• Data collection follows a standardized protocol with 40 replicate traps distributed across a 19.75-hectare area.
• Provides a five-year continuous record (July 2000 - June 2005) of biweekly measurements.
• Litter is sorted into specific components (leaves, fruits/flowers, wood, miscellaneous), enabling detailed analysis.
• Values are reported as mean and standard error, offering a measure of uncertainty for the 40 samples.

Limitations

• Key metadata like row count, exact column names, and dataset size are not provided by any source.
• Sources conflict on the last update date, with one platform listing 2005-06-11 and another listing 2026-03-13, suggesting potential metadata errors.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), LBA-ECO project.

Collection Method

Litter collected from 40 circular mesh traps every ~14 days, sorted into components, oven-dried at 60°C, and weighed.

Time Range

July 2000 through June 2005.

Freshness

2026-03-13 01:04:02.010087

Geography

Para Western (Santarem) - km 67, Primary Forest Tower Site, Tapajos National Forest, north central Brazil.