The Center for Tropical Forest Science, or CTFS, was a consortium of forest researchers who pursued long-term research on tree populations using comparable census method.
The work developed out of a study of 50 hectares of forest on Barro Colorado Island in Panama begun in 1981.
All individual trees larger than 1 centimeter in stem diameter were measured, mapped, and identified, which included 300 different species.
Parallel censuses of large forest plots were carried out in Africa, Latin America, and Asia.
[1] Numerous scientific research reports on tree species diversity, distribution, life span, and growth rates have been published based on these plots.