Output details

Self-similarity and scaling in forest communities

Forestry strategies to mitigate carbon emissions (e.g. re-forestation, increasing carbon density of existing forests, reducing emissions from deforestation) require understanding of mass allocation, metabolic fluxes and resource use in forests. Despite differences in climate and biodiversity, power-law distributions for trees' attributes (height, trunk diameter, crown radius etc.) and allometric relationships between these quantities are ubiquitous in tropical forests, suggesting some general underlying principle. By assuming that size and geometry of trees have evolved to optimise transport of water and nutrients, paper derives scaling relationships linking all ecological quantities of interest, and their distributions.