Permanent forest plots in mining concession areas don't fail because the baseline data was poorly collected. They fail because the re-monitoring data can't be reconciled with it. The individual IDs drift. The morphospecies codes used by the first team don't match the ones used eighteen months later. A brinzal flagged in cycle 1 can't be confirmed as the same individual in cycle 3 because there's no consistent unique identifier tied to GPS coordinates.
This template addresses that structural problem at the data entry level.
The Monitoring Cycle as the Unit of Analysis
The Nuevo recluta flag (Sí/No) marks individuals that weren't present in the prior monitoring cycle. In a permanent plot, every record without this flag set to Sí is a carry-over individual — a tree that was already there and is being re-measured. The ID field is the constant across cycles: the same painted or tagged number on the trunk, mapped to the same Ubicacion GPS pin.
The value of this structure becomes visible when you filter across two cycles. Cycle 1: 847 records in Plot A, Nuevo recluta = No for all. Cycle 2: same 847 carry-overs plus 23 new recruits, plus any that died and are absent. The mortality rate — individuals in cycle 1 not present in cycle 2 — requires an explicit absence recording protocol, but the recruits are directly counted from the Nuevo recluta = Sí filter.
That recruitment and mortality rate, at the Fustal and Latizal level, is the core forest dynamics metric for mining impact assessment. It determines whether the forest is recovering, stable, or declining — and it's the metric regulators and environmental supervisors will scrutinize at each annual review.
Porcentaje and the Abundance Estimation Problem
The Porcentaje field records the frequency or abundance estimate of the morphospecies at the plot level — typically the percentage of stems in that category relative to total stems sampled. It's an ecologically coarse metric but operationally useful for rapidly identifying dominant species and flagging dramatic shifts.
A morphospecies that drops from 12% abundance to 3% between cycles in a Fustal-class filter is a signal that warrants investigation: direct impact from mining activity, selective harvesting, a pathogen event. Without the Porcentaje field logged consistently across cycles, that shift is invisible until someone builds a separate analysis outside the field data.
Handling Multi-Stemmed Individuals Without Losing BAsal Area
The seven CAP fields, matched against the Ramificaciones count, are the calculation input for basal area on multi-stemmed individuals. For a tree with three stems (Ramificaciones = 3), CAP 1 through CAP 3 give you the three perimeter measurements. Converting to DBH and summing the basal area per stem gives the total individual basal area.
Aggregated across all Fustal-class individuals per plot, this is the basal area per hectare figure — the primary structural metric for forest biomass estimation. In a mining sector environmental compensation calculation, basal area per hectare by plot is the denominator for ecosystem service valuation. Getting it wrong, or inconsistently, invalidates the baseline.
The Altura comercial field records the merchantable bole height — the height from ground to first significant branch. In the context of compensation valuation, this is the timber volume input. A stand with high total height but low commercial height is architecturally different from one where commercial height equals 70% of total height, and the distinction matters for both carbon stock calculations and legal compensation rates.