the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
| 04 May 2026
30 years of course particulate organic matter exports from tropical montane watersheds
Abstract. Leaf litter is an important energy source for aquatic food webs and biogeochemical cycles. As leaf litter from the watershed enters streams it slowly starts to break down and transform into course particulate organic matter (CPOM). While this has been extensively explored in temperate regions, many questions remain in the tropics about patterns, timing, and magnitudes of CPOM inputs. Here we present 30 years of continuous CPOM data collected in two streams of the Bisley Experimental Watersheds (BEW) in the Luquillo Experimental Forest in northeastern Puerto Rico. We report CPOM as litterflow, which is all the plant and organic material that flows and accumulates from multiple sources (i.e., canopy, riparian zone, and upstream) and is collected at a fixed location in each stream. In this long-term dataset, temporal patterns (peaks and seasonality) can be observed in relation to various hurricanes and drought periods that occurred in Puerto Rico. The BEW litterflow data provides a view into the inherent connection between terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems to better understand how organic material can move through the landscape to be exported in streams and transported downriver to sustain the food webs of receiving bodies of water.
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CC1: 'Comment on essd-2026-190', Beatrix Beisner, 31 Jul 2026
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AC1: 'Reply on CC1', Bianca Rodriguez-Cardona, 31 Jul 2026
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Thanks for these thorough and supportive comments and suggestions. We will look into adjusting the figures to make it easier to interpret. We will also make sure to adjust course throughout the document.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2026-190-AC1
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AC1: 'Reply on CC1', Bianca Rodriguez-Cardona, 31 Jul 2026
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CC2: 'Comment on essd-2026-190', Alicia Dixon, 22 Sep 2026
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Overall, this paper presents a valuable and robust dataset from the Luquillo Experimental Forest. The long-term and averaged monthly data will be very useful for future work and an important resource for both leaf litter, tropical ecosystem, and Luquillo-specific research. Additionally, the different categories within CPOM are useful way for analyzing litter inputs and presenting the data from a different lens. Please see line specific comments below.
Line 23: Should this be "break down" (2 words) instead of breakdown (1 word)? It is being used as a verb here which makes me think you mean "break down". Overall the structure of this sentence makes it feel incomplete. Maybe it is missing a comma after leach?
Line 31: I think "transported" should just be "transport" to have parallel structure/nouns in the list. Or it should be "Leaf litter can arrive to streams via different pathways
such as wind or rain, and be transported from surface flow...." to differentiate the two parts of the sentence. The commas making it a list makes it confusing.Line 37: Comma needed after Caribbean
Line 55: I recommend just saying "CPOM" here, as saying "CPOM or litterflow" makes it sound like you are reporting on two different variables while in the abstract you say you report CPOM as litterflow (Line11). Maybe define litterflow earlier in the introduction so it is clear here what you mean when you say CPOM.
Line 61: It may be helpful to provide a map here or to better explain what you mean by Bisley Experimental Watersheds. Someone who is not as familiar with LEF or who is only familiar with other watersheds in LEF may not understand the different watersheds or that the RÃo Mameyes Watershed is one of the BEW (I am guessing the way it is described here?). As someone who only worked near El Verde the different watersheds is confusing, especially because you refer to BEW throughout the paper instead of Mameyes.
Line 70: Should "mesh" be plural here?
Line 45: I think "streams" should be possessive with an apostrophe
Line 84: Can you provide more detail for these categories? Is it a certain number of months before/after each event? Or is the total time for after until the next event starts and if so then when does the next event's before period start? This could use more information so that the reader can better interpret the graphs for natural disturbances later in the paper.
Line 90: You are talking about CPOM here but reference fig 2 which has leaf litter on the axes and CPOM in the caption (in line 105 you say CPOM is presented as the sum of all compartments-- which in the methods you define as "the sum of leaves, wood, and miscellaneous parts"). This difference in language and specifications is confusing. I recommend using one term to be consistent through the paper, and being clearer in the caption and figure what exactly you are showing. Is the figure truly showing leaf litter? Or is the figure actually showing CPOM aka the sum of multiple compartments-- are the axes labelled incorrectly?
Line 91: Please specify if the ±156g is SD or SE
Line 92: check consistency throughout for whether or not you are spelling out figure or abbreviating as fig. and whether or not you have a period after "fig" when abbreviating
Lines 116-117: first sentence is missing a period and second sentence has two periods
Lines 117 & 127 & 143: See comment for line 91
Line 120 & 133: See comment for line 55
Line 145: This figure has wood on the x-axis and looks almost identical to figure 5, yet the caption says that this is misc material, not wood. this is confusing both in the text (lines 139-140) and when looking at the figures. Is it the wrong figure? or are the axes wrong?
Line 166: See comment above for line 84. Clearly there is a different before and after hurricanes, but without knowing how you defined before and after the event there is some uncertainty or confusion for the reader interpreting the analysis.
Line 187: See comment above for line 166
Line 206: Perhaps edit to say "long-term" effects or "effects of compounding natural disturbances", as there have been many papers that have come out of the LEF analyzing the effects of both hurricanes and droughts, just not at the time scale you present here
Line 207: Please define IITF before using acronym
Lines 207-211: This info might be more appropriate for the methods section, as it instead of contributing to some of the larger conclusions you are able to make in your paper, it is more distracting away from such takeaways.
Line 215: this reference to how this paper/data ties in to global carbon modelling might be explored earlier in the paper in the discussion or even mentioned briefly as context in the introduction. It is a valid and important point to make, but feels a bit randomly thrown in here at the end.
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Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2026-190-CC2
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I have reviewed the article and it looks like a highly useful data contribution. The data are long-term and solid and from an underrepresented ecosystem type (a tropical Montane watershed). The monthly variation across different coarse woody debris types is valuable. The article is well written overall.Â
Just a few minor comments:Â
1. "Course" needs to be changed to "coarse" in various places in including the title and abstract.Â
2. Figure 3 has a lot going on. I would suggest that the sub panels a-c be referred to directly in the figure caption.
3. Figures 7 through 9: It could be interesting to convert the simple dot and whiskers into something that shows the distribution of the data better - such as violin plots.Â
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