Demographic trends and climate over 35 years in the Barro Colorado 50 ha plot

Background The first three censuses of the 50-ha plot at Barro Colorado Island spanned an unusually harsh dry season during the 1983 El Nino. By the early 1990s, we had documented increases in tree mortality, tree growth, and large population fluctuations of many species during the 1982–1985 census interval. At the time, we asserted that increasing drought frequency would greatly affect the forest. With the benefit of five more censuses at Barro Colorado from 1995–2015, we can now put the 1980 conditions in a longer perspective and test the hypothesis that increasing droughtiness has continued to change the forest.