Scaling, as the translation of information across spatial, temporal, and organizational scales, is essential to predictions and understanding in all sciences and has become a central issue in ecology. A large body of ...Scaling, as the translation of information across spatial, temporal, and organizational scales, is essential to predictions and understanding in all sciences and has become a central issue in ecology. A large body of theoretical and empirical evidence concerning allometric scaling in terrestrial individual plants and plant communities has been constructed around the fractal volume-filling theory of West, Brown, and Enquist （the WBE model）. One of the most thought-provoking findings has been that the metabolic rates of plants, like those of animals, scale with their size as a 3/4 power law. The earliest, single most-important study cited in support of the application of the WBE model to terrestrial plants claims that whole-plant resource use in terrestrial plants scales as the 3/4 power of total mass, as predicted by the WBE model. However, in the present study we show that empirical data actually do not support such a claim. More recent studies cited as evidence for 3/4 scaling also suffer from several statistical and data-related problems. Using a forest biomass dataset including 1 266 plots of 17 main forest types across China, we explored the scaling exponents between tree productivity and tree mass and found no universal value across forest stands. We conclude that there is not sufficient evidence to support the existence of a single constant scaling exponent for the metabolism-biomass relationship for terrestrial plants.展开更多
The past few decades have seen a resurgence of Interest in biological allometry. Specifically, a number of recent studies has suggested a -4/3 Invariant scaling relationship between mass and density that Is universall...The past few decades have seen a resurgence of Interest in biological allometry. Specifically, a number of recent studies has suggested a -4/3 Invariant scaling relationship between mass and density that Is universally valid for tree-dominated communities, regardless of their phyietic affiliation or habitat. In the present study, we test this scaling relationship using a comprehensive forest biomass database, Including 1 266 plots of six blomes and 17 forest types across China. The present study shows that the scaling exponent of the massdensity relationship varies across different tree-dominated communities and habitats. This great variability In the scaling exponent makes any generalization unwarranted. Although Inappropriate regression methods can lead to flawed estimation of the scaling exponent, inconsistency of theoretical framework and empirical patterns may have undermined the validity of previous work.展开更多
基金中国科学院知识创新工程项目，the Natural Resources Research, the Chinese Academy of Sciences，中国科学院资助项目
文摘Scaling, as the translation of information across spatial, temporal, and organizational scales, is essential to predictions and understanding in all sciences and has become a central issue in ecology. A large body of theoretical and empirical evidence concerning allometric scaling in terrestrial individual plants and plant communities has been constructed around the fractal volume-filling theory of West, Brown, and Enquist （the WBE model）. One of the most thought-provoking findings has been that the metabolic rates of plants, like those of animals, scale with their size as a 3/4 power law. The earliest, single most-important study cited in support of the application of the WBE model to terrestrial plants claims that whole-plant resource use in terrestrial plants scales as the 3/4 power of total mass, as predicted by the WBE model. However, in the present study we show that empirical data actually do not support such a claim. More recent studies cited as evidence for 3/4 scaling also suffer from several statistical and data-related problems. Using a forest biomass dataset including 1 266 plots of 17 main forest types across China, we explored the scaling exponents between tree productivity and tree mass and found no universal value across forest stands. We conclude that there is not sufficient evidence to support the existence of a single constant scaling exponent for the metabolism-biomass relationship for terrestrial plants.
基金Supported by the Knowledge Innovation Program of the Institute of Geo- graphic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, the Chinese Academy of Sciences （CX10G-E01-02-01, CX10G-E01-08-02, and KZCX1-SW-01- 01A2）, the National Natural Science Foundation of China （30330150）.
文摘The past few decades have seen a resurgence of Interest in biological allometry. Specifically, a number of recent studies has suggested a -4/3 Invariant scaling relationship between mass and density that Is universally valid for tree-dominated communities, regardless of their phyietic affiliation or habitat. In the present study, we test this scaling relationship using a comprehensive forest biomass database, Including 1 266 plots of six blomes and 17 forest types across China. The present study shows that the scaling exponent of the massdensity relationship varies across different tree-dominated communities and habitats. This great variability In the scaling exponent makes any generalization unwarranted. Although Inappropriate regression methods can lead to flawed estimation of the scaling exponent, inconsistency of theoretical framework and empirical patterns may have undermined the validity of previous work.
