Plant energetics and population density

Roderick C. Dewar ()
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Roderick C. Dewar: Unit de Bioclimatologie, INRA Centre de Bordeaux, BP 81

Nature, 1999, vol. 398, issue 6728, 572-572

Abstract: Abstract Enquist et al. 1 present data from 37 plant species showing that the use of resources by individual plants scales approximately as the 3/4 power of plant mass, as predicted previously from a model of resource use in fractal-like branching structures2. Thus, Q ∝ M3/4, where Q is the resource use, estimated as xylem transport, and M is the plant mass. In addition, their re-analysis of data from 251 populations1 showed that the ‘thinning law’ between maximum plant population density (Nmax) and plant mass also obeys 3/4-power scaling, with Nmax∝ M−3/4. From these two data sets, they inferred that population resource use per unit area is approximately independent of plant mass, with NmaxQ ∝M0, a relation termedenergy equivalence3.

Date: 1999
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DOI: 10.1038/19215

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