The Field That Breaks Every Standard Spreadsheet
The Categoria crecimiento M1 field is not decorative. It is the linchpin of every comparative analysis this template supports. When you are standing in a reforested plot three years after the first monitoring sweep, you need to know whether an individual that registered as latizal bajo in M1 has since crossed the DBH threshold into latizal alto or stagnated — and you need that answer before you move to the next transect, not back at the office. The moment you separate M1 growth category from M2, you create a field-auditable delta that no pivot table can match for speed under fieldwork conditions.
The Periodo de abandono field is equally misunderstood by ecologists who inherit this system without building it themselves. Abandonment period is not a narrative note. It is a covariate. Plots with four-year abandonment histories respond differently to the same rainfall regime than plots with nine years of post-agricultural rest. If you are not recording it per-lot with the same rigor you apply to CAP measurements, your regeneration models are sitting on a cracked foundation.
And then there is Cobertura. Forest cover percentage, recorded at ingress. The instinct is to treat it as background context, something you note down and forget. Veterans of long-term forest monitoring know it is the first number a reviewer reaches for when your M1-to-M2 survival rates look anomalous. A plot with 85% initial canopy closure that shows low sapling growth is not underperforming — it is suppressed by crown competition. A plot with 30% cover and the same low growth is a problem that demands explanation.
Seven CAP Readings Per Individual, Per Monitoring Period
Most dendrometry protocols stop at one CAP measurement per tree. This template carries seven. That is not redundancy; that is methodology. Multi-stemmed individuals — and in secondary forest regeneration, they are everywhere — produce different basal area estimates depending on which stem you measure. The fields CAP M2(cm) through CAP7 M2(cm) are there because a Cecropia that sprouted two dominant stems after a wind event in year two is a biologically distinct entity from the single-stemmed specimen entered in M1. Averaging across stems without recording each one creates phantom growth curves that will not survive peer review.
The parallel structure — identical CAP1-through-7 fields in both M1 and M2 — is what makes the comparative audit possible. You can pull any individual by ID_Ind, align M1 and M2 records, and compute incremental basal area without writing a single formula. The data is already paired.
Ht M2(m) and Hc M2 (m) — total height and commercial height — give you the vertical complement to the girth data. The gap between Ht and Hc narrows as crown form improves. That ratio is invisible if you only record one or the other.
When the Plot Disagrees With Itself
A Condicion Mon 2. entry reading muerto on an individual whose M1 CAP M1(cm) showed 22 cm is a data point that demands cross-referencing with Observaciones and % MON 2 before you close the record. Survival rate analyses built on raw mortality counts without condition-code auditing routinely overestimate stand failure. The Atendido field — the attended/managed flag — is your control variable. A dead tree in a plot that received silvicultural intervention in the intervening period is not the same ecological signal as an unmanaged mortality event.
The % _INI and %_MON1 percentage fields, when paired against % MON 2, give you a three-point survival curve per plot lot. At 1,000-plus individual records across multiple parcels, that curve stops being descriptive and starts being predictive.