The Reiteración field — a simple yes/no with a companion letter code — is the kind of data point that separates a professional flora inventory from an amateur species list.
Stem reiterations are architecturally distinct growth events from the main axis. In dasometric inventories following Whittaker protocol, failing to record reiterations per individual means your CAP measurement and your canopy projection area are unanchored from the plant's actual structural reality. When you come back to the same parcela in two years for a comparative census, misidentified reiterations become mis-attributed growth increments. The field exists because the error happens constantly, and it's expensive to correct.
The Price of Treating a Parcela as a Photograph
Flora inventories fail as longitudinal datasets when the initial record lacks enough structural detail to re-anchor to. A record with morfoespecie name, one CAP measurement, and a parcela ID tells you almost nothing at year two. You don't know which individual within the parcela you're measuring. You don't know if the original individual has since produced a second reiteration axis that was merged into the main measurement. You don't know if the brinzal population you're comparing against last season was recorded at the same average height threshold.
The Whittaker methodology imposes quadrat structure and growth-category stratification for exactly this reason. Fustales, Latizales, Brinzales, and Hierbas are separate counting and measurement domains. A fustal record carries a CAP in centimeters. A brinzal record carries a count of individuals and an average total height. Merging these into a single undifferentiated list — as spreadsheet inventories almost always end up doing — collapses the population dynamics data that makes the inventory scientifically defensible.
What Each Record Actually Captures
The Cobertura field maps physical vegetation strata through a controlled vocabulary: Pa, Pe, Pl, Tdd, Tud, Vst, Bd — cover types that code for everything from high-canopy dense tree cover to vine-dominated zones. Applied at record entry, this field allows post-processing queries that isolate all brinzal records under Tud cover versus those under Pa, producing the data needed for light-limitation analysis without any manual re-coding.
CAP (circunferencia a la altura del pecho) in centimeters, not DBH — a deliberate choice that reflects Colombian forestry convention and avoids the unit-conversion errors that plague multi-institution data sharing.
Porcentaje de cobertura brinzales en la parcela is an integer percentage estimated at the parcela level, not the individual level. Combined with Brinzales - conteo individuos, it gives both density and area expression for the regeneration layer. The flag for individuos clonales — pastos and other clonal species where counting individuals is ecologically meaningless — switches the record type so that coverage percentage becomes the primary metric rather than count.
The Colectado and Prensado flags at the end of the record are the specimen custody chain. When you're 400 meters into a cloud forest patch at 2,800 meters elevation with your vasculum half-full and deteriorating humidity, the last thing you want to reconstruct later is which specimens made it back pressed and which ones were documented in the field but never collected. Marking Colectado at point of collection and Prensado when the specimen is physically in the press means herbarium curation can proceed directly from database export without a secondary reconciliation step.