Geospatial data for Luquillo Mountains, Puerto Rico: Mean annual precipitation, elevation, watershed outlines, and rain gage locations

These geospatial data sets were developed as part of a new analysis of all known current and historical rain gages in the Luquillo Mountains, Puerto Rico published in the journal article Murphy, S.F., Stallard, R.F., Scholl, M.A., Gonzalez, G., and Torres-Sanchez, A.J., 2017, Reassessing rainfall in the Luquillo Mountains, Puerto Rico: Local and global ecohydrological implications: PLOS One 12(7): e0180987, p. 1-26, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0180987. That article provides a revised map of mean annual precipitation developed using elevation regression functions and residual interpolation, and that map is presented here in a raster file. Most previous forest- and watershed-wide estimates of precipitation (and evapotranspiration, as inferred by a water balance) have assumed that precipitation increases consistently with elevation in the Luquillo Mountains; therefore, precipitation in leeward Luquillo watersheds has been overestimated by up to 40%.Because the Luquillo Mountains often serve as a wet tropical archetype in global assessments of basic ecohydrological processes, these revised estimates are relevant to regional and global assessments of runoff efficiency, hydrologic effects of reforestation, geomorphic processes, and climate change.