These datasets and script document the analyses and the plot generation for the article “Trends in background mortality in unmanaged forests across Europe over the last century”. We used a comprehensive network of permanent plots with repeated censuses spanning from 1936 to 2020 in 299 unmanaged forest reserves across Europe. The database includes 1.5 million tree records over successive censuses covering a total sampled area of 853.7 ha.

It consists of the following files:

• Mortality_script.Rmd: R markdown document to reproduce the analysis and the plot generation.
• plot_level.RDS: This dataset contains annual mortality rate values for each permanent plot at each census, of plots with at least three censuses. This dataset is used to calculate the weighted mean annual background mortality rates by forest types, and the series of models to study the trends of annual mortality rates, and then to create Figure 1 and Figure 2.
• tree_level.RDS: This dataset contains tree census data for each permanent plot at each census, of plots with at least two censuses. This dataset is used to model species-specific size-dependent mortality probabilities of the studied tree species, and then to create Figure 3.