Leaf:wood allometry and functional traits together explain substantial growth rate variation in rainforest trees.

ABSTRACT: Plant growth rates drive ecosystem productivity and are a central element of plant ecological strategies. For seedlings grown under controlled conditions, a large literature has firmly identified the functional traits that drive interspecific variation in growth rate. For adult plants, the corresponding knowledge is surprisingly poorly understood. Until recently it was widely assumed that the key trait drivers would be the same (e.g. specific leaf area, or SLA), but an increasing number of papers has demonstrated this not to be the case, or not generally so. New theory has provided a prospective basis for understanding these discrepancies. Here we quantified relationships between stem diameter growth rates and functional traits of adult woody plants for 41 species in an Australian tropical

SUBMITTER: Gray EF 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6510017 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature