The difference between above- and below-ground self-thinning lines in forest communities |
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Authors: | Wei-Ping Zhang Xin Jia Yan-Yuan Bai Gen-Xuan Wang |
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Affiliation: | (1) College of Life Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310058, China; |
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Abstract: | Quantifying the self-thinning process in various plant communities has been a long-standing issue in both theoretical and empirical studies. Most studies on plant self-thinning have centered only on aboveground parts, and rarely on belowground parts. There is still a general lack of comparison between above- and belowground self-thinning processes, especially for forest communities. The fundamental mechanistic difference and the functional association between above- and belowground competition indicate that the self-thinning process of belowground parts may be different from that of aboveground parts. We investigated the self-thinning lines for above-ground (M A), below-ground (M B), and total biomass (M T), respectively, across forest communities in China. The results showed that neither the classical self-thinning rule (−3/2 exponent) nor the universal scaling rule (−4/3 exponent) can apply to all the self-thinning relationships across these forest communities and that the self-thinning lines for belowground biomass were flatter and lower than those for aboveground biomass across most of these forest communities. |
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