Tree-ring–based diameter growth data for Rhizophora mangle in the Colombian Caribbean
Description
Cispatá Bay, located in the Colombian Caribbean, hosts the country’s only mangrove under a regulated sustainable use model. Yet, current management guidelines rely on generalized silvicultural criteria, which do not reflect species-specific growth dynamics, potentially compromising sustainability. This study aims to improve sustainable forest management in Cispatá Bay by developing species-specific growth models for Rhizophora mangle, a dominant and heavily harvested species. We used tree-ring data from 26 dead individuals to evaluate diameter growth, and applied nonlinear mixed- effects modeling, accounting for autocorrelation and growth eccentricity. The resulting models yielded biologically meaningful ontogenetic traits and silvicultural parameters, including a maximum mean diameter, a weighted average growth rate, a lifespan, and a halflife.
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Steps to reproduce
Tree-ring data were obtained from 26 cross-sections of Rhizophora mangle trees collected in the Colombian Caribbean. For most samples, two radii were measured; one radius was used for model calibration, while the other was used for model validation. Ring-width measurements were delimited using CooRecorder software (Cybis Elektronik & Data AB, n.d.), and tree diameter was calculated as twice the measured radius, where the radius corresponds to the cumulative ring width. Because the pith often does not align with the geometric center of the cross-section, diameter estimates can be biased. To correct for this, an eccentricity correction factor was applied following the method proposed by Giraldo & del Valle (2011). The resulting dataset is in long format, pre-sorted for diameter growth modeling. All models in the study were fitted using maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) via the nlme package (Pinheiro et al., 2021) in R (R Core Team, 2024). The inclusion of autocorrelation structure to the model, as well as the estimation of ontogenic traits and silvicultural metrics, followed the protocol used in Martínez et al. (2025). References: Cybis Elektronik & Data AB. (n.d.). CooRecorder [Computer software]. http://www.cybis.se/forfun/dendro/ Giraldo, J. A., & del Valle, J. I. (2011). Estudio del crecimiento de Prioria copaifera (Caesalpinaceae) mediante técnicas dendrocronológicas. Revista de Biología Tropical, 59(4), 1813–1831. Martínez, C. E., Orrego, S. A., Giraldo, J. A., del Valle, J. I., Hernández-Barajas, F., & David, D. A. (2025). Autocorrelation as a critical factor of growth depensation of tropical trees in the Chocó biogeographic region. Ecological Modelling, 500, 110949. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2024.110949 Pinheiro, J., Bates, D., DebRoy, S., Sarkar, D., & R Core Team. (2021). nlme: Linear and Nonlinear Mixed Effects Models. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=nlme R Core Team. (2024). R: A language and environment for statistical computing (Version 4.1.1) [Computer software]. https://www.R-project.org/
Institutions
- Universidad Nacional de Colombia Sede Medellin