Plot-level soil temperature and moisture data for a tropical forest understory warming experiment (TRACE) in Luquillo, Puerto Rico, 2015-2023

The Tropical Responses to Altered Climate Experiment (TRACE) is a forest understory warming experiment aimed at understanding how increased temperature and disturbance affect carbon cycling and ecosystem processes in tropical forests. This dataset contains plot-level soil temperature and moisture data from six experimental plots at TRACE; three plots are experimentally warmed with infrared heaters to a target understory temperature of 4˚C above ambient, and three plots are un-warmed control plots. Each plot has five Campbell Scientific CS655 soil sensors: three at a depth of 0-10 cm, one at a depth of 20-30 cm, and another at a depth of 40-50 cm. Data in this package were cleaned and formatted to include information about sensor location within the plots. This data package contains one CSV file per year from October 2015 to December 2023, for a total of nine data files, as well as a data dictionary describing the variables.