How much biomass can plant communities pack per unit volume?
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Abstract
Aboveground production in terrestrial plant communities is commonly expressed in amount of carbon, or biomass, per unit surface. Alternatively, expressing production per unit volume allows the comparison of communities by their fundamental limits in packing carbon. In this work we reanalyzed published data from more than 900 plant communities across nine ecosystems to show that standing dry biomass per unit volume (biomass packing) consistently averages around 1 kg/m3 and rarely exceeds 5 kg/m3 across ecosystem types. Furthermore, we examined how empirical relationships between aboveground production and plant species richness are modified when standing biomass is expressed per unit volume rather than surface. We propose that biomass packing emphasizes species coexistence mechanisms and is an indicator of resource use efficiency in plant communities.
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2014. How much biomass can plant communities pack per unit volume? PeerJ PrePrints 2:e677v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.677v1note This preprint is not peer-reviewed. You may wish to reference the subsequent peer-reviewed version of this article.
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This is a submission to PeerJ for review.
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Competing Interests
The authors declare they have no competing interests.
Author Contributions
Raphael Proulx conceived and designed the experiments, analyzed the data, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Guillaume Rheault performed the experiments, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Laurianne Bonin performed the experiments, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Irene T Roca performed the experiments, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Charles A Martin analyzed the data, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Louis Desrochers performed the experiments, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Ian S Seiferling conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, wrote the paper, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Funding
This research was supported by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) research grant to R. Proulx. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
