PARENT SESSION
Thursday, August 10, 8:00-11:30 am
COS 79 - Stoichiometry, allometry, and scaling
Mississippi, Mezzanine Level, Cook Convention Center
Presiders: D Jenerette
A general allometric plant production model: integrating leaf traits, efficiency, and whole-plant allocation.
Enquist, Brian*,, Kerkhoff, Andrew , McCarthy, Megan2, Price, Charles, Swenson, Nathan, Stark, Scott, 2 Department of Biology and Department of Mathematics, Gambier, OH, USA
ABSTRACT- Understanding the integration of plant functional traits with whole-plant performance is critical for (i) scaling attributes of organisms to large scale ecosystem dynamics in addition to (ii) understanding how selection shapes integrated phenotypes. Recent work has highlighted prominent and potentially universal botanical scaling relationships at the leaf and whole-plant levels. However, scaling patterns at the leaf-level and whole-plant allometric scaling relationships have remained separate in the literature and need to be reconciled. Importantly, the theoretical developments within these separate literatures have not convincingly shown the origin of the normalizations of these scaling relationships. Here we develop a predictive theoretical framework that mechanistically links many plant functional traits together within a unified plant scaling model. The model predicts specific scaling relationships between and within leaf-level traits and whole-plant allocation. We show that the synthesis of leaf-level and whole-plant theories can predict the value of many allometric scaling normalizations. Thus, the model appears to be able to predict, with a relatively high degree of precision, the amount of biomass produced and Carbon fluxed per unit phytomass. Observed data generally support the predictions of the model indicating that botanical functional diversity can potentially be described by a unified model. These results highlight that functional variation in leaf and whole-plant traits can be merged into a common quantitative and theoretical framework for an integrated phenotype. The work also suggests that many attributes of plants can be integrated from first principles of the scaling and allocation of metabolic production.
Key words: Allometry, Plant functioal traits, Scaling