The Automated DAP Field That Removes One Transcription Error Per Tree
The Dap field is a calculated field: CAP / π. You measure circumference with a tape, you enter it into CAP, and the database computes diameter automatically. This is not a convenience — it is a data integrity mechanism. Dendrology datasets are full of DBH values that were manually converted in the field with a calculator, rounded at the wrong decimal place, or transposed from a field sheet that was wet. A calculated field eliminates all three failure modes at the source.
The separation of CAP (raw measurement) from Dap (derived value) also creates an auditable record. If a downstream analysis questions a diameter value, you can verify it against the circumference measurement. If someone edited the DAP by hand — overriding the formula — the discrepancy between CAP and the expected calculation is immediately visible.
Circumference at Two Heights, Canopy Position, and Why Both Are Installation Parameters
Circunferencia inf and Circunferencia sup — lower and upper circumference measurements at the dendrometer installation point — document the taper geometry of the stem section where the instrument will be mounted. A point dendrometer reacts to radial changes in the xylem at the exact position it occupies. If that position sits on a pronounced flare or a stem irregularity, the radial signal will include non-growth deformation components. Recording both upper and lower circumference at installation lets you characterise the local stem form and flag individuals where taper-induced measurement artifacts are likely.
Posicion Estrato Social — dominant, codominant, or suppressed — is the light environment proxy that contextualises the growth signal. Suppressed individuals in a closed-canopy tropical forest show flat to negative radial growth during dry periods not because they are water-stressed in the conventional sense but because their source-sink balance is already compromised by chronic shading. A dendrometer on a suppressed individual and one on a dominant tree of the same species, same DBH, same elevation, will produce fundamentally different seasonal amplitude curves. If you pool them without the canopy position flag, your inter-individual variance inflates and your climate sensitivity estimates become meaningless.
Phenology as the Biological Context That Makes Growth Data Interpretable
The Fenologia field — defoliated, flowering, fruiting, or no change — is recorded at installation and at each monitoring visit. Tropical forest ecophysiologists have known for decades that radial growth and phenological phase are not independent variables. A stem that is actively flowering is allocating non-structural carbohydrates toward reproduction, not radial growth. The dendrometer during that phase will show a flattened or even negative radial increment that is biologically normal but statistically anomalous relative to the vegetative growth phase.
Without phenology timestamps, you are fitting climate-growth models to a signal that is periodically dominated by reproductive allocation and have no way to partition the variance. The field takes five seconds to complete at each visit and makes the difference between a growth dataset and a growth model.
The Foto image field is the installation photo — the physical record that shows the instrument position, the stem surface condition, and the bracket orientation at the moment of installation. When the instrument needs recalibration or replacement, this photograph is the reference that ensures reinstallation matches the original geometry.